Faculty of Arts and Philosophy
Dagmar De Tandt
‘Making Heads Throb Heartlike’: David Foster
Wallace’s Oblivion as a Deleuzian Clinical and
Critical Project
Supervisor: Sarah Posman
Master dissertation submitted in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree
of “Master in English”
Academic year 2012-2013
Acknowledgments
‘(…) thesis, the project that had occupied and defined me for months’ (Here
and There)1
In the car reading interviews with David Foster Wallace: ‘[James Brown: “I Feel Good” in
background, on the restaurant sound system]’ (Lipsky 2010, 41). “WAAAAAHW!!” hits the
radio. Wallace: This is Water. Tinariwen: Water is Life. Amounts of Pop Gas (Wolfgang Voigt),
2000, label: Mille Plateaux. Four Ivorians with a ‘Champion’ sweater on the TV, my Dad
standing next to them with the same sweater. ‘“Gomni” veut dire Le Bonheur’
(http://youtu.be/XwqbU7kgc7k) I do become-dancer to this. Calibri became my font. Thanks
to Sarah Posman for guiding me through Deleuze & Wallace. In the end, all my love to Tine
and (grand)parents
Dagmar, August 2013
1
Wallace 2012, 154 (From: Girl with Curious Hair)
Table of Contents
1. Introduction
1
2. Gilles Deleuze and David Foster Wallace
3
2.1.
David Foster Wallace Studies
3
2.2.
Oblivion and Gilles Deleuze
5
3. Deleuze and Literature
7
3.1.
The Clinical and the Critical
8
3.2.
Life and Vitalism: Difference and Becoming
9
3.3.
The ‘Healthy’ Author
13
3.4.
The Literary Machine
18
3.5.
Language: Minor and Stutter
20
4. Wallace’s Vitalistic Resistance Against Irony
25
4.1.
(Postmodern) Irony
26
4.2.
Humour or Superior Irony
28
4.3.
Superior Irony in Literature
30
4.4.
Wallace’s Vitalistic Resistance Against Irony
32
4.5.
Superior Irony and Multiplicity in “Good Old Neon”
37
5. Wallace’s Clinical and Critical Project in “Mister Squishy”
44
5.1.
Clinical Oblivion
45
5.2.
“Mister Squishy”
49
5.3.
Terry Schmidt’s Struggle
57
5.4.
Critical Oblivion
62
5.4.1. The Reader
63
5.4.2. The Functioning of “Mister Squishy”
65
5.4.3. The Effects of “Mister Squishy”
72
5.4.4. The Becoming of “Mister Squishy”
76
6. Conclusion
84
7. Appendix
85
8. Works Cited
87
1. Introduction
Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and David Foster Wallace (1962-2008) both felt that tennis is
more than simply hitting a ball back and forth over the net. For Deleuze, Björn Borg was a
‘Christlike’ figure because he ‘invented a new style that opened up tennis to a sort of
proletariat’ (1995, 132). For Wallace, watching Federer play was a ‘religious experience’
(2006). Both Borg and Federer were inventors of a new way of playing the game. Deleuze
admired inventors because they show us ‘something unforeseen, a new syntax, a
transformation’ (1995, 132). Similarly, Wallace argued that ‘Federer is able to see, or create,
gaps and angles for winners that no one else can envision’ (2006). In this dissertation, I want
to show how Wallace is an inventor of a new way of playing the literary game. Moreover, I
will discuss how he makes the reader of Oblivion (2004) experience something new and
unforeseen. In the first chapter of this dissertation, I will discuss Gilles Deleuze’s approach to
literature. In a Deleuzian approach, the literary work is regarded as both a critical and a
clinical project. An author provides a clinical diagnosis but he evokes a ‘cure’ through the
critical aspect or the style and technique of his work. This is clearly reflected in Wallace’s
description of ‘fiction’s limitless possibilities (…) for making heads throb heartlike’ (Wallace
1998, 218). Wallace’s writing style displays this possibility because the head of Wallace’s
reader throbs with a clinical diagnosis evoked by his challenging style and technique. In
chapter two, I describe how Wallace is an inventor of the literary game. His fiction attempts
to go beyond postmodern ironic literature in order to display a certain form of authenticity
or sincerity. It will become clear that Wallace’s attempt culminates in a writing style that
blends irony and sincerity. This ‘blend’ will be discussed with regard to the story “Good Old
Neon”. In chapter three, I discuss Wallace’s critical and clinical project with a focus on the
story “Mister Squishy”. The first part of this chapter discusses the clinical diagnosis that is
central in all of the stories of Oblivion. Wallace diagnosed how people suffered from their
struggle to stay aware and resist forgetfulness or oblivion. This struggle is reflected in the
main protagonist of “Mister Squishy”, Terry Schmidt. In the second part of this chapter, I will
discuss how Wallace makes the reader aware of his diagnosis through the story’s style and
technique. The reader of “Mister Squishy” has to struggle to stay aware amidst an overload
1
of data written in a complex and digressive style. However, I will also argue that Wallace
makes the reader experience something unforeseen, gaps and angles we could not envision.
Wallace tries to show the reader that he or she does not always have to suffer in the
struggle between awareness and oblivion. This dissertation aims to show how Wallace’s
fiction can be more for the reader than turning pages, just like tennis more than hitting a
ball. David Foster Wallace will prove to confirm Gilles Deleuze’s statement that great authors
always want ‘to bring something to life, to free life from where it’s trapped, to trace lines of
flight’ (Deleuze 1995, 141).
2
2. Gilles Deleuze and David Foster Wallace
David Foster Wallace was an American fiction and essay writer, most famously known as the
author of Infinite Jest, the monstrous bestseller published in 1996.3 The literary criticism on
Wallace was mostly focused on Infinite Jest, but since his death, ‘his reputation as one of the
most significant writers of his era has become firmly established’ (Kelly 2010). In his essay,
‘David Foster Wallace: the Death of the Author and the Birth of a Discipline’, Kelly outlines
several ‘waves’ that occurred in ‘Wallace Studies’. He argues how the recent wave in the
literary criticism on Wallace, is concerned with his ethical aspects and also his interplay with
important thinkers or philosophers. In this dissertation, the French philosopher Gilles
Deleuze is used as a useful vantage point for approaching David Foster Wallace’s short story
collection Oblivion. Deleuze wrote extensively on literature and he valued and approached
literature entirely in his own way. I will show that what Deleuze valued in great literature,
can also be found in Wallace’s fiction. In the next chapter, I elaborate on Deleuze’s distinct
approach to literature. In the following pages, I will clarify my position with regard to
Wallace’s criticism and discuss how this paper is relevant for the study of Wallace’s fiction.
2.1.
David Foster Wallace Studies
In his essay, Kelly provides us with a clear overview of ‘the development of academic
scholarship on Wallace from the early 1990s until his death’ (2010). Kelly argues that there
are three important waves in the literary criticism surrounding Wallace. The first wave
‘understood Wallace’s fiction primarily in terms of its emphasis on science and information
systems and its intersections with American postmodernism’ (Kelly 2010). In chapter three, I
will discuss how Wallace’s writing can be regarded as an attempt to move beyond
postmodern literature. The second wave in Wallace Studies was almost entirely concerned
3
For a wonderful summary of Wallace’s life and work, I highly recommend D.T. Max’s article in The New Yorker,
“The Unfinished” (2009). Access online: http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2009/03/09/090309fa_fact_max
3
with ‘Wallace’s own articulation of his project’ (Kelly 2010). This refers to Wallace’s essay “E
Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (1993) and an interview with Larry McCaffery in
1993. This interview-essay nexus,
provided critics with the terms of Wallace’s challenge to prevailing artistic
assumptions – focused on the role of irony and metafictional self-reflexivity in
contemporary reading – and would greatly shape their reading (Kelly 2010)
Wallace’s own articulations became ‘an inescapable point of departure’ (Kelly 2010). There
was a general consensus that Wallace’s writing can be regarded ‘as a response to irony and
to his literary forefathers’ (Kelly, 5). Similarly, this is also the point of departure for my
discussion of David Foster Wallace. In chapter three, I discuss Wallace’s response to irony
and his postmodern legacy, which is crucial for understanding how he is an ‘inventor’.
The third and latest wave in Wallace’s criticism is refreshing because it moves both beyond
Wallace’s own remarks about his writing project and beyond an ‘examination of Wallace’s
relation to preceding literary figures’ (Kelly 2010). Wallace’s writing was no longer viewed
‘primarily in terms of aesthetic representation, but of ethical intervention’ (Kelly 2010). This
latest wave provided critics and readers with
what has been, from a literary-critical perspective, the most striking feature of
Wallace Studies thus far: namely the implicit agreement among so many critics with
Wallace’s professed premise that fiction should act as both “diagnosis and cure”
(Kelly 2010)
In this dissertation, Gilles Deleuze’s approach will clarify how Wallace’s stories offer us both
a diagnosis and a possible cure. Furthermore, the use of Gilles Deleuze as a vantage point
coincides with another characteristic of the third wave. Adam Kelly remarked that most of
the papers presented at the Wallace conferences in 2009, were ‘conspicuous for the extent
to which prevailing theoretical systems, and a wide variety of theorists, were engaged with
as the major foil for Wallace’s fiction’ (2010). Similar, I apply Gilles Deleuze as a vantage
point for approaching Wallace’s fiction. However, I must point out that I do not discuss
Wallace’s work as if it were a response to or a dialogue with Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy.
Even though it is possible because of Wallace’s philosophical background, the aim of this
4
dissertation is to discuss the value of Wallace’s writing in Oblivion.4 His writing will prove to
be a Deleuzian clinical and critical project. The aim of this dissertation is therefore close to
the task Kelly assigned for the future Wallace critic:
It remains the task of the literary critic to show as precisely as possible (…) how
Wallace’s radical method for waking readers up to agency operates in his texts, and
how this technique is linked to his highly original style (Kelly 2010)
A Deleuzian framework will show how Wallace’s ethical and clinical concerns are evoked by
his critical style and technique. My approach towards Wallace’s fiction as a clinical and
critical project therefore resembles the task Kelly points out for the Wallace critic. This paper
can therefore be aligned with the latest third wave in Wallace Studies. Moreover, I argue
that it also provides two refreshing perspectives to Wallace Studies: Oblivion and Gilles
Deleuze.
2.2. Oblivion and Deleuze
Wallace’s short story collection Oblivion is certainly not the most discussed or analyzed work
of his oeuvre. It mostly stays under the critical radar because a lot of attention is directed
towards his novels. The literary criticism on Oblivion is mostly part of a larger framework
that goes beyond the short story collection. However, in the most recent academic criticism,
Oblivion is allowed a place in the spotlights.5 “Good Old Neon”, which won the O. Henry
Award in 2002, is probably the most famous and critically praised story of the collection.
After Wallace’s suicide in 2008, the story even became one of his better known due to the
fact that the story features a main character who has committed suicide. In this dissertation,
I will also discuss “Good Old Neon” in detail. Moreover, I also discuss the story “Mister
Squishy” elaborately because I will argue that it is a great example of Wallace’s clinical and
4
Wallace wrote an undergraduate philosophy thesis on Richard Taylor’s “Fatalism” (1962).
Greg Carlyle will publish a critical reader of Oblivion in August, 2013, “Nature’s Nightmare: Analyzing David
Foster Wallace’s Oblivion”. Marshall Boswell also contributed a piece on Oblivion in A Companion to David Foster
Wallace Studies (2013).
5
5
critical project. While “Good Old Neon” has been extensively discussed, “Mister Squishy”,
the first story of the collection, has often been overlooked. Furthermore, I will counter the
overall negative feeling towards Oblivion. For example, Boswell argued that ‘of all of David
Foster Wallace’s books, Oblivion is the bleakest’ (2013). 6 Critics often feel that Wallace does
not succeed in providing the reader with a cure. However, a Deleuzian framework will help
me focus on the strength of these stories even if I cannot deny that ‘many in the collection
have a tamped-down sense of doom’ (Max 2012, 278).
In this dissertation, I will show how Deleuze’s approach to literature can provide us with a
new way of reading Oblivion. Deleuze’s philosophy can often be complex and vague: ‘No
term in his work is capable of being defined in itself; any single term makes sense only in its
relation to the whole which it helps to create’ (Colebrook 2003, 4). Moreover, the academic
study of Deleuze’s approach to literature is still fairly recent.7 The challenge was therefore to
combine both Deleuze’s own remarks and those of his critics. In chapter two, I offer a more
‘simplified’ version of Deleuze’s approach to literature. It will become clear that Deleuze’s
‘work does not provide a theory of literature so much as a way of forming questions through
literature, questions that should challenge life’ (Colebrook 2003, 7). Deleuze will offer us a
specific approach for reading Wallace’s fiction because Deleuze ‘allowed the creations of
literature and observations of science to make a repeated philosophical claim: a claim about
the very force of life in general’ (Colebrook 2003, 13). I therefore hope to show that
Wallace’s fiction provides us with a way of forming questions that challenge life. Throughout
this dissertation, I therefore keep Colebrook’s advice in mind that the ‘challenge of
“Deleuzism” is not to repeat what Deleuze said but to look at literature as productive of new
ways of saying and seeing’ (Colebrook 2003, 150). In the next chapters, I therefore hope to
offer such a fascinating read of Wallace’s stories in Oblivion.
6
D.T. Max noted that ‘there was also an undercurrent of irritation, even anger, on the part of his critics –
Wallace was denying them the full enjoyment of his great talents’ (Max 2012, 279). Michiko Kakutani argued
that Wallace ‘all too often settles for the sort of self-indulgent prattling that bogged down his 1999 collection,
“Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,” and the cheap brand of irony and ridicule that he once denounced in an
essay as “agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture”’ (Kakutani 2004).
7
Ten years ago, Colebrook wrote that ‘as yet, though, there is not a Deleuzean movement in literary criticism’
(Colebrook 2003, 150).
6
3. Deleuze and Literature
Gilles Deleuze’s distinct approach towards literature will serve as the central framework for
approaching David Foster Wallace’s fiction in the course of the following chapters. I will
argue that what Deleuze valued in great literature, is exactly what most critics admire in
Wallace’s fiction. Deleuze regards the literary work as a critical and clinical project, which
means that authors provide a clinical diagnosis and a cure. In great authors, Deleuze argues
that the cure is in the style or that it is the style. According to Deleuze, authors can offer a
possibility of life, a way out of the diagnosis. In doing so, they portray what Deleuze refers to
as ‘vitalism’. It is therefore a question of ‘evaluating it [a literary work] clinically in terms of
its “vitality”’ (Smith, 1997, liii). Deleuze argues that great authors express powers of ‘life’ in
their work.8 When Deleuze argues that powers of life flow through a work he means that the
work expresses a whole range of elements he valued in great literature, flows and forces
such as difference and becoming. Furthermore, the life of the author is no longer central
because Deleuze approaches the literary work as a machine that functions and produces
effects. Furthermore, the reader is assigned an experimental role because he has to find out
what vitalistic effects a literary work is capable of producing. For Deleuze, the most
important effects a work can evoke within the reader, are effects embedded in the style,
language and technique of the author. All these aspects of Deleuze’s approach towards
literature, will be discussed with regard to David Foster Wallace’s fiction in the next
chapters.
8
This notion of life is a philosophical concept in Deleuze’s philosophy, with ‘a complex ontological and ethical
status’ (Smith 1997, xiii). In general, for Deleuze life or Life is ‘an open and creative whole of proliferating
connections’ (Colebrook 2003, 5). In this dissertation, I use life instead of Life to avoid the complex philosophical
connotations.
7
3.1. The Critical and the Clinical
Deleuze’s critical and clinical project as a framework for literature, first appeared in his
discussion of De Sade and Masoch, Masochism: Coldness and Cruelty (1967). The idea of the
critical and the clinical in literature resonated in all of his writing on literature, but it was not
until 1993 that Deleuze was able to devote an entire book to his project: Essays Critical and
Clinical. In his writing on literature, Deleuze argues that symptomatology is not solely
restricted to medicine, but that artists, philosophers and authors can study signs and
symptoms as well:
Symptomatology is situated almost on the exterior of medicine, at a neutral point, a
zero point, where artists and philosophers and physicians and patients can meet one
another (Deleuze as quoted in Bogue 2003, 16)9
Gilles Deleuze held authors in high regard and considered them as important as other great
thinkers and philosophers. His writing therefore features numerous literary references, for
which he and Félix Guattari, have been criticized. Their response highlights their faith in the
diagnostic potential of literature: ‘But is it our fault that Lawrence, Miller, Kerouac,
Burroughs, Artaud, and Beckett know more about schizophrenia than psychiatrists and
psychoanalysts?’ (Deleuze 1995, 23). For Deleuze, building on Friedrich Nietzsche, a great
author resembles a doctor: ‘As Nietzsche said, artists and philosophers are civilisation’s [sic]
doctors’ (Deleuze 1995, 143). In Deleuze’s approach to literature, the author is
a Nietzschean physician of culture, both a symptomatologist who reads culture’s
signs of sickness and health, and a therapist whose remedies promote new
possibilities of life (Bogue 2003, 2)
9
Deleuze, Gilles. “Mystique et masochisme” La quinzaine littéraire 25 (April 1-15, 1967), 12-13
8
For Deleuze, these clinical signs are intertwined with the critical aspect of great authors. In
his study on Sade and Masoch, Deleuze showed that their ‘clinical symptoms are inseparable
from the literary styles and techniques’ (Smith 1997, xviii). A Deleuzian approach to
literature therefore embodies that ‘the literary technique and style of the writer (the critical)
is directly linked to the creation of a differential table of vital signs (the clinical)’ (Smith 1997,
li). As I have mentioned, Deleuze will prove to be useful for approaching Wallace’s fiction
because his critical and clinical project resembles the task that Adam Kelly pointed out for
the Wallace critic.10 In the next chapters, I will therefore present Wallace as a
symptomatologist who points out signs of illness but also promotes new possibilities of life.
This is a clinical image that has always resonated in the writings on Wallace. For example,
Baskin admired ‘Wallace’s ambition to write a novel that would not only document but also
respond to these kinds of pain’ (Baskin 2009). Gilles Deleuze will serve as a useful vantage
point for showing how Wallace points out ‘ways of living, possibilities of existence, (…)
symptoms of life gushing fort or draining away’ (Deleuze 1995, 143).
3.2 Life and Vitalism: Difference and Becoming
Deleuze’s approach to literature is entirely concerned with ‘Life’ or what he referred to as
‘vitalism’. The notion of Life is central for Deleuze and his ‘writings on literature are primarily
linked with the problematics of Life’ (Smith 1997, xiii).11 The work of great authors is
embedded in Life and they are vitalistic when ‘they invent ways of living, of surviving,
resisting, and freeing life’ (Marks 1999, 125). This is a quality to be found in both art and
philosophy and Deleuze even characterized his own writing as such: ‘everything I’ve written
is vitalistic, at least I hope it is’ (Deleuze 1995, 143). For Deleuze, ‘any work of art points a
way through for life, finds a way through the cracks’ (Deleuze 1995, 143). The vitalistic
strength of great literature is that it is always aimed at ‘freeing life wherever it is imprisoned’
(Deleuze & Guattari 1994, 171). In chapter three, I discuss Wallace’s vitalistic attempt to free
10
‘It remains the task of the literary critic to show as precisely as possible (…) how Wallace’s radical method for
waking readers up to agency operates in his texts, and how this technique is linked to his highly original style’
(Kelly 2010)
11
The first essay of Essays Critical and Clinical is “Literature and Life” (Deleuze 1997).
9
life from the prison of irony in order to point out ways towards more sincerity and
authenticity. In chapter four, Wallace’s clinical diagnosis shows us that we suffer in our
struggle to stay aware. I will argue how Wallace evokes vitalistic possibilities for life which
show us that this struggle does not need to be a source of suffering.
First, however, I will briefly explain Deleuze’s vitalism. In her book, Deleuze and the Meaning
of Life, Claire Colebrook describes Deleuze’s vitalism as passive and argues that his ‘passive
vitalism presents us with a new way of approaching what it is to think’ (Colebrook 2010, 7).
The concept of vitalism
in its narrow sense might be identified with a handful of relatively recent names:
Henri Bergson, Raymond Ruyver, William James; and a broader tendency in
twentieth-century thought to critize [sic] the ways in which systems, such as
language or logic, have their origin in animating life but then come to operate
independently of the thought and sense that is their condition of emergence
(Colebrook 2010, 1).
Colebrook divides vitalism into two types: an active and a passive vitalism. An active vitalism
in philosophy aims at the ‘tracing back of any system, position, dogma or truth claim to the
conditions of its genesis, never accepting a truth without also grasping its coming into being’
(Colebrook 2010, 7). An active vitalistic approach to literature is then characterized by the
premise that ‘the world we live in is a synthesized, conceptualized and formed world, and it
is in the work of art that, once again, we see these forms in their formation’ (Colebrook
2010, 68). Deleuze’s passive vitalism on the other hand,
is at one and the same time committed to intuiting the emergence of the milieu in
which thought takes place while also confronting the thousand other plateaus that
parse life through a different logic (Colebrook 2010, 7)
Instead of looking for the essence or the genesis of something, Gilles Deleuze ‘lodges the
tendency towards difference and the splitting of any potentiality at the heart of life’
(Colebrook 2010, 20). In his passive vitalistic approach, ‘life is increasingly liberated from any
proper form or essence, its essence being nothing other than the event of its own selfformation’ (Colebrook 2010, 24). With regard to literature, Deleuze’s vitalism no longer
10
regards the work as ‘a thing that ought to be read and interpreted according to its content’
(Colebrook 2010, 24). Instead, Deleuze’s vitalism makes us look at what the work is able to
produce. Both literary and philosophical texts become ‘productions (or machines) that
enable life to produce images and relations’ (Colebrook 2010, 21). When I refer to the
vitalistic power of a literary work or when I describe an author as vitalistic, I do not refer to
Deleuze’s philosophical concept of vitalism. I do not wish to imply any of the complex and
philosophical connotations of Deleuze’s vitalism. Instead, with the word vitalism, I aim to
describe what is both Deleuze’s and great literature’s strength. Deleuze’s vitalism is aimed at
liberating us from fixed forms and essences, towards an approach of difference and
becoming. Deleuze aims at freeing us from a prison and similarly, literature is vitalistic when
it is able ‘to free life from where it’s trapped, to trace lines of flight’ (Deleuze 1995, 141).
When I describe Wallace’s fiction as vitalistic, I refer to a whole range of Deleuzian concepts
such as life, ethics, health, difference and becoming.
The vitalism or the Life that Deleuze values in a literary work is a rich collection of several
connotations and concepts. For example, a literary work can be described as vitalistic when
it displays a tendency towards ethics, and not morality. Deleuze rejects morality because it
‘presents us with a set of constraining rules of a special sort, ones that judge actions and
intentions by considering them in relation to transcendent values’ (Deleuze 1995, 100).
Ethics on the other hand, ‘is a set of optional rules that assess what we do, what we say, in
relation to the ways of existing involved’ (Deleuze 1995, 100). A great author should be able
to evaluate life without being constrained by any imposed system or overarching moral
code. Instead, great authors break free from these constraints as they try to move beyond
morality. Such authors are described by Deleuze as ‘healthy’ authors, as opposed to ‘sick’
authors. An author is sick when he ‘judges life from the perspective of sickness, (…)
devaluates life in the name of “higher” values’ (Smith 1997, xv). Instead, to live or write
healthy is ‘an overflowing and ascending form of existence, (…) always increasing the power
to live, always opening up new possibilities of life’ (Smith 1997, xv). These healthy authors
are vitalistic because they not only judge and diagnose life, but because their works are
always becoming, always producing, ‘to write is to trace lines of flight’ (Deleuze & Parnet
2007, 53).
11
The concept of becoming is crucial for Gilles Deleuze because both art and philosophy are
regarded as portraying ‘the explosive force of life, a life that is in a process of constant
“becoming”’ (Colebrook 2003, 12). For Deleuze, ‘writing is inseparable from becoming’
(Deleuze 1997, 1). It does not display a stable world or ‘being’ because ‘all “beings” are just
relatively stable moments in a flow of becoming-life’ (Colebrook 2003, 125). Instead of
portraying a stable world or ground behind things, vitalistic literature shows us a ‘virtual
world’, ‘beyond any specific observation or experience: the very possibility of life’ (Colebrook
2003, 13). Deleuze’s becoming challenges us to ‘think without models, axioms or ground’
(Colebrook 2003, 126). Similarly, great literature should not portray a being or fixable
identities that we can recognize, but rather a ‘becoming-imperceptible’. For Deleuze, ‘the
aim, the finality of writing is becoming-imperceptible’ (Deleuze & Parnet 2007, 56). A literary
work is be able to produce vitalistic effects when it presents us with something that we
cannot recognize or pin down.
When a literary work is vitalistic, it is also concerned with ‘difference’, because ‘life is
difference, the power to think differently, to become difference and to create differences’
(Colebrook 2003, 13). Difference is another crucial concept in Deleuze’s philosophy.
According to Deleuze, art and literature display the power of difference or the ‘philosophical
potential to distort representation, to convey movement, flux and multiplicity that cannot be
found in traditional philosophical writing’ (Currie 2004, 3). For Deleuze, difference is not
opposition or contradiction, but rather, difference is ‘a positive multiplicity’ (Currie 2004,
65). Multiplicity is the force of life, it is the ‘real element in which things happen’ (Deleuze
1995, 146). Multiplicity is the ‘real element’ because it has no center. Instead, it is the power
of life that constantly makes new connections and creates new multiplicities. For Deleuze,
multiplicity is the force which makes life ‘an open and creative whole of proliferating
connections’ (Colebrook 2003, 5). If life is embedded in the powers of difference, becoming
and multiplicity, literature will display these forces because the aim of great literature is ‘to
produce the real, create life’ (Deleuze & Parnet 2007, 60).
12
In Deleuze’s philosophy and his approach towards literature, a whole variety of concepts
come together, with clear similarities and differences.12 I have chosen to use ‘vitalism’ as a
term to refer to the different aspects Deleuze values in literature. In doing so, the term
‘vitalism’ refers to forces of life, health, becoming and difference. In general, I use the term
vitalism to refer to the power of literature to ‘create new connections, open experience up
to new beginnings, and allow us to think differently’ (Colebrook 2003, 5). In the following
chapters, I will therefore attempt to describe how Wallace represents vitalistic forces of
becoming and difference. I will argue that Wallace is a ‘healthy’ author who creates lines of
flight or ‘a creative deployment of forces in new configurations’ (Bogue 2003, 2). However,
in order to describe Wallace as a ‘healthy’ author, I must first discuss Deleuze’s specific
approach to the figure of the author.
3.3. The ‘Healthy’ Author
When Deleuze and Guattari describe authors as healthy, they are not writing about their
physical health. Rather,
What little health they possess is often too fragile, not because of their illnesses or
neuroses but because they have seen something in life that is too much for anyone,
too much for themselves, and that has put on them the quiet mark of death. But this
something is also the source or breath that supports them through the illnesses of
the lived (what Nietzsche called health) (Deleuze & Guattari 1994, 172-173)
Deleuze adopted this description of ‘healthy’ from Friedrich Nietzsche. 13 According to
Deleuze, it is because of their vitality that great authors are often sick. They can ‘have a
12
For example, his approach can also be described as a schizoanalysis, as opposed to a paranoid approach
‘beginning from the assumption that there are fixed orders such as language or logic that order life’ (Colebrook
2003, 5). The schizo is not a person, but schizoanalysis is ‘a way of thinking a life not governed by any fixed norm
or image of self – a self in flux and becoming, rather than a self that has submitted to law’ (Colebrook 2003, 5).
13
Deleuze’s vitalism and philosophy is clearly influenced by Nietzsche’s ‘philosophy of “becoming”, characterized
by flux, movement and creation’ (Marks 1999, 56). Nietzsche is therefore ‘arguably one of the most important
philosophers for Deleuze’ (Marks 1999, 56). The triumvirate of Deleuze, Nietzsche and Wallace would be
interesting to elaborate upon, but for reasons of clarity and conciseness I will not go into detail on both
13
fragile personal life, an uncertain health, at the same time as they carry life to the state of
absolute power or of “Great Health”’ (Deleuze 2007, 5). Both Gilles Deleuze and David Foster
Wallace fit eerily in the picture of authors who carry both a weak and a great ‘health’.
Deleuze had a frail physical health because of respiratory problems until he committed
suicide on November 4, 1995 (Marks 1999, 2). Wallace on the other hand, suffered from
years of depression that ultimately led to his suicide on September 12, 2008. However, from
a Deleuzian perspective, I reject a psychoanalytical interpretation of Wallace’s work, while
still acknowledging the ‘Great Health’ of Wallace as the author.
Deleuze strongly resists psychoanalytical interpretations of authors in which they become
patients. Such an approach treats artists ‘as clinical cases, as if they were ill, however
sublimely, and the critic seeks a sign of neurosis like a secret in their work’ (Smith Daniel W
1997, xvii). For Deleuze, writing literature is not ‘to recount one’s memories and travels,
one’s loves and griefs (sic), one’s dreams and fantasies’ (Deleuze 1997, 2). A psychoanalytical
approach suffers from ‘interpretosis’ or the ‘Western disease that traces all becomings back
to some origin’ (Colebrook 2003, 134). According to Deleuze, this is an Oedipal approach in
which life or literature becomes a drama ‘with all experiences leading back to a scene of loss,
trauma or separation from the maternal source of life’ (Colebrook 2003, 134). Instead, a
great novelist ‘goes beyond the perceptual states and affective transitions of the lived. The
artist is a seer, a becomer’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1997, 171). In Deleuze’s approach, the author
is still central, not as a patient, but as a doctor or a clinician of civilization.
In his approach to the figure of the author, Gilles Deleuze is often placed alongside other
poststructuralist thinkers such as Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault. In the late 1960s,
Barthes’ “Death of the Author” challenged the status of the author as the center of a text. In
his essay, Barthes argued that ‘writing is fundamentally without origin’ and he attacked ‘the
oppressive control of authorial consciousness and critical guardianship’ (Bennett 2005, 15).
The author was no longer the central authority and the critic was no longer limited to
Deleuze’s and Wallace’s connection to Nietzsche. Nietzsche will nevertheless reappear throughout this thesis,
especially when I discuss Wallace’s clinical diagnosis in chapter four.
14
interpret the work by means of the author’s intentions and experiences. The text had
become a ‘plurality of meaning’ because of the death of the author and the implied birth of
the reader (Bennett 2005, 15). Barthes therefore replaced the ‘controlling, limiting
subjectivity of the author with the controlling, limiting subjectivity of the reader’ (Bennett
2005, 18). Together with Foucault’s essay, Barthes ‘laid the foundations for later literarycritical and theoretical thinking about authors’ (Bennett 2005, 28). However, this poststructural-rejection of the author did not provide us with a definite approach towards the
author and his work. Instead, both these essays ‘may in fact be understood to have more
securely fixed in place the question of the author in the interpretation of literary and other
cultural texts’ (Bennett 2005, 108).
Deleuze’s thought on the author shares certain similarities with the poststructuralist
approach but there is nevertheless much in Deleuze ‘that separates him from the rest of his
generation of poststructural [sic] philosophers’ (Bogue 2004, 64). As mentioned, Deleuze
rejects a psychoanalytical interpretation and therefore the total authority of the author, but
the author is still central in Deleuze’s approach. The vitalistic power of a work of art flows
through both the author’s work and life. Deleuze’s approach is open because it suggests that
‘we take what we need from an author; (…) However, in order to find what we need, it is
necessary to be open-minded, take on the work of an author as a whole’ (Marks 1999, 3).
Similar to Barthes then, Deleuze attributes an important role to the reader. The reader
should no longer look for a ground or meaning that may have been inserted by the author,
but he should read for the vitalistic becomings in the text. However, according to Deleuze
the author is not dead because he regards the author’s life and work as a multiplicity.
Deleuze tries to surpass the problem of the author, by looking at what the work is capable of
producing. . While Deleuze can be said to be a very author-centered writer who uses labels
such as ‘Beckettism’ or ‘Proustism’, it is important to understand that he is not referring to
the authors themselves but to their vitalism and their style: “Style, in a great writer, is always
a style of life too, not anything at all personal, but inventing a possibility of life, a way of
existing’ (Deleuze 1995, 100). In doing so, Deleuze offers us a possibility to go beyond the
problem of the figure of the author and focus on what he regarded as the power and great
value of literature.
15
Deleuze’s approach towards literature is especially useful with regard to David Foster
Wallace’s life and work. In most of the criticism surrounding Wallace, the topic of his
depression and suicide is almost unavoidable. A.O. Scott therefore warns us that ‘the
temptation to regard Mr. Wallace’s suicide (…) as anything other than a private tragedy must
be resisted’ (Scott 2008). However, this temptation resonates strongly while reading
Wallace’s fiction and especially Oblivion, which features a whole range of damaged and
depressed characters and even suicides. In his work, Wallace’s ‘personality is stamped on
every page – so much that the life and the work can seem not just connected but
continuous’ (Scott 2008). With regard to Wallace’s fiction, I will therefore avoid a
psychoanalytical interpretation, because this devaluates both the work and the author.
Wallace himself emphasized that he attempted to ‘demystify the figure of the author and
downplay the direct significance of biography to artistic creation’ (Giles 2007, 329).
By applying a Deleuzian framework, I am able to reject a psychoanalytical interpretation of
Wallace’s work while still acknowledging the vitalistic force that flowed from his life into his
work. Wallace himself insisted ‘on the necessary link between life and literature’
(Konstantinou 2012, 105). A Deleuzian approach to Wallace’s life and work is useful because
Wallace’s fiction often challenges the reader on this ground. For example, in the story “Good
Old Neon”, we encounter a monologue by Neal who tells us why he has committed suicide.
He decided to kill himself because he always felt like a fraud and he recounts us his struggles
that ultimately led to his suicide. Near the end of the story, however, the name ‘David
Wallace’ suddenly appears in the text. This ‘David Wallace’ was ‘idly scanning class photos
from his 1980 Aurora West H.S. yearbook’ and when he saw Neal’s photo, he tried ‘to
imagine what all must have happened to lead up to my death in the fiery single-car accident
he’d read about in 1991’ (Wallace 2005, 180). It is suggested that Neal’s monologue is
actually ‘David Wallace’ trying to imagine what had led to Neal’s suicide. Moreover, after a
depressing monologue by Neal about why he felt like a fraud, we learn that ‘David Wallace’
himself had emerged ‘from years of literally indescribable war against himself’ (181). In
doing so, David Foster Wallace ‘both invites and dares his readers to read Neal’s story as
thinly disguised autobiography’ (Boswell 2013).
16
Via a Deleuzian reading of Wallace’s work, I am able to go beyond the problem of the
author, his life and his work. Wallace himself argued to approach authors in a similar vein.
For example, my reading of Wallace resembles Wallace’s own approach to the
mathematician George Cantor. Wallace rejected a psychoanalytical approach even if ‘it’s
fairly clear that G.F.L.P. Cantor suffered from manic-depressive illness at a time when
nobody knew what this was’ (Wallace as quoted in Max 2012, 275).14 Instead, Wallace
argued to read for the vitalistic power of Cantor’s work:
the truth, though, is that Cantor’s work and its context are so totally interesting and
beautiful that there’s no need for breathless Prometheusizing the poor guy’s life
(Wallace as quoted in Max 2012, 275)
Both Deleuze and Wallace seem to prefer to focus on the vitalistic forces a literary work is
able to evoke. Deleuze helps us to establish an open perspective towards the life and work
of authors because of his belief in the vitalistic power of literature. In Deleuze’s approach,
great authors and their literary works carry a certain vitalistic force that goes beyond
themselves or their writing, otherwise everyone would seem ‘to have a book in them, simply
by virtue of having a particular job, or a family even, a sick parent, a rude boss’ (Deleuze
1995, 130). Similarly, Wallace adopts an open perspective to the discussion of the life and
work of an author because he believed in a higher purpose for art and literature:
Really good fiction could have as dark a worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way
both to depict this dark world and to illuminate the possibilities for being alive and
human in it’ (McCaffery 2012, 26)
What Wallace regards as the power of literature therefore resembles Deleuze’s vitalism that
is able to free life from what imprisons it. If we agree that great literature can display these
vitalistic forces, we should focus on them, instead of losing ourselves in the endless debate
about the life and work of the author. I will therefore focus on the vitalistic effects of
Wallace’s writing in Oblivion and adopt the role that Deleuze assigned to the reader. In
14
Quoted from Everything and More: A Compact History of Infinity (2004)
17
Deleuze’s approach, the literary work is a machine and the reader has to experiment with it
in order to find out how it functions and what useful effects it is capable of producing.
3.4. The Literary Machine: ‘Experiment, never interpret’ (Deleuze 2007, 48)
For Deleuze & Guattari,
Reading a text is never a scholarly exercise in search of what is signified, still less a
highly textual exercise in search of a signifier. Rather, it is a productive use of the
literary machine (…) that extracts from the text its revolutionary force (Deleuze and
Guattari 1983: 106 as quoted in Baugh 2000, 34)
Deleuze approaches the book as a literary machine that is productive and capable of
producing certain effects. 15 Deleuze and Guattari therefore describe themselves as ‘strictly
functionalists’ (Deleuze 1995, 35). This means that instead of asking what a literary work
could mean, they prefer to find out how a literary work functions. In A Thousand Plateaus,
Deleuze and Guattari elaborate on their preference of function over meaning:
We will never ask what a book means, as signified or signifier; we will not look for
anything to understand in it; We will ask what it functions with, in connection with
what other things it does or does not transmit intensities, in which other
multiplicities its own are inserted and metamorphosed (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 4)
The literary machine is vitalistic because it aims at producing new possibilities for life.
Furthermore, it is clear why we would not ask a book what it means because ‘it is nothing
more than the connections and productions it makes; it is what it does’ (Colebrook 2003, 5556). This explains how neither the author nor the literary work is central, but the focus is on
15
I prefer to maintain Deleuze’s approach to the literary work as a machine, even though it is more complicated.
As Jean-Jacques Lecercle points out: ‘the theory of machines (…) is a first version of the theory of assemblages’
(Lecercle 2002, 183). The concept of the machine is in fact ‘a transitional concept, a step towards (…) the
concept of assemblage’ (184). For this paper, it is more than enough to regard the literary work as a machine
that produces effects through the author’s style and technique.
18
what the work does. The name of the author or the name of the literary work refers to the
signs and effects that are produced by the literary machine.
Because the book is a machine, the reader has the specific task of working with the machine.
The reader is given an experimental role, he or she has to find out how the literary work
functions and therefore experiment with it. Furthermore, he will experience how it works, he
will experience the becoming of the literary work: ‘what we experience, experiment with, is
always actuality, what’s coming into being, what’s new, what’s taking shape’ (Deleuze 1995,
106). The reader has to experiment to find out which vitalistic effects or forces the work is
able to produce. Moreover, the reader has to evaluate these ‘forces in terms of whether
they increase or decrease a power of acting’ (Baugh 2000, 35). Such a Deleuzian reading can
be described as a ‘revolutionary pragmatics of reading’ (Baugh 2000, 34). It represents an
experimental approach that is both ‘results-oriented (pragmatic) and experiential
(empirical)’ (Baugh 2000, 35). The reader has to figure out how the machine works, which
effects it produces and which effects can work for him or her:
You see the book as a little non-signifying machine, and the only question is “Does it
work, and how does it work?” How does it work for you? If it doesn’t work, if nothing
comes through, you try another book. This second way of reading’s intensive:
something comes through or it doesn’t (Deleuze 1995, 8)
The reader thus has a certain freedom to experiment ‘just to see what happens’ (Baugh
2000, 35). However, while the reader has a certain freedom, he also has the responsibility to
experiment in order to ‘accomplish goals other than those of simply reading and interpreting
it’ (Baugh 2000, 36). Because the literary machine is a becoming of forces and effects, it
creates a multiplicity with other forces outside the work. A Deleuzian reading ‘relates a book
directly to what’s Outside. A book is a little cog in a much more complicated external
machinery’ (Deleuze 1995, 8).
A Deleuzian reading is both useful and fruitful, it ‘maximizes the powers of both works and
readers, rather than subordinating one to the other’ (Baugh 2000, 35). The book is regarded
as a machine that functions and produces in itself, but it is only because of the reader that
19
the machine can become effectual. Furthermore, a Deleuzian experimental reading can be
said to be more objective than other approaches: ‘Interpretation involves an opinion
concerning what a work or author “really means”, (…) by contrast, whether something
produces an effect, and what the effect is, is an objective matter’ (Baugh 2000, 39). I will
therefore perform an experimental reading of the stories in Oblivion. Especially in the last
chapter, I will regard the story “Mister Squishy” as a machine of becoming that produces
certain effects. This reading will prove to be both experimental and empirical, but also
pragmatic and results-oriented. I will show how “Mister Squishy” functions as a machine,
what effects it is capable of producing and what these effects can mean for the reader.
Moreover, I will argue how this Deleuzian reading increases both the power of Wallace’s
stories and its readers.
3.5. Language: Minor and Stutter
A literary machine produces its strongest effects through the style and technique of the
author. A vitalistic author should therefore be
a foreigner, but in one’s own tongue, not only when speaking a language other than
one’s own. To be bilingual, multilingual, but in one and the same language, without
even a dialect or patois. To be a bastard, a half-breed, but through a purification of
race. That is when style becomes language (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 109)
A vitalistic author will therefore push language beyond its boundaries and become a
foreigner in his own language. For Deleuze, great authors show a style of life when their
language is a ‘becoming-other of language, a minorization of this major language, a delirium
that carries it off, a witch’s line that escapes the dominant system’ (Deleuze 2001, 5). A great
author is thus able to write in the minor mode of a language, as opposed to the major mode
of a language:
The major and minor mode are two different treatments of language, one of which consists
in extracting constants from it, the other in placing it in continuous variation (Deleuze &
Guattari 2004, 118)
20
In the minor mode of language, the author is creative and inventive with language, he
pushes language beyond its own boundaries. Furthermore, a minor author is also political
because the major mode or ‘the unity of language is fundamentally political’ (Deleuze &
Guattari 2004, 112). When an author writes in the minor mode, his language ‘necessarily
engages power relations as it counters the restrictive controls of standard usage and sets
nonstandard variables at play within language’ (Bogue 2003, 100). By writing as a foreigner
in his own language, a great author resists imposed laws and structures because ‘forming
grammatically correct sentences is for the normal individual the prerequisite for a
submission to social laws’ (Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 112). Instead, the minor author is
vitalistic and he frees his language from its own norms, he creates lines of flight and ‘the line
of flight is deterritorialization’ (Deleuze & Parnet 2007, 36). In its deterritorialization of
language, minor literature is not minor because it is written for or from within a minority
group. Rather, it is minor because it shakes the power relations of its major language.
Moreover, Deleuze & Guattari argue that in minor literature, ‘everything takes on a
collective value’ (Deleuze & Guattari 1986, 17). The minor author is political and collective
because ‘the problem for the minor writer is that the present configuration of the social
order is unacceptable, and an alternative collectivity does not yet exist’ (Bogue 2003, 109).
They cannot speak in the name of present minorities because they reject the power relations
that define these minorities. As a vitalistic author, the minor author will point out new
possibilities for life:
The ultimate aim of literature is to set free, in the delirium, this creation of a health
or this invention of a people, that is, a possibility of life. To write for this people who
are missing (Deleuze 1997, 4)
Minor authors thus write for people who are missing. Again, this resonates the power of
literature to break free and invent new forces, new possibilities of life. Great literature is a
becoming, it is ‘the expression and creation of what is not yet, not present or other than the
actual’ (Colebrook 2003, 99). For Deleuze, the vitalistic strength of literature to break free, to
express a becoming and not a ‘being’, is especially powerful in the style and technique of an
author:
21
The writer uses words, but by creating a syntax that makes them pass into sensation
that makes the standard language stammer, tremble, cry, or even sing: this is the
style, the “tone”, the language of sensations, or the foreign language within language
that summons forth a people to come (Deleuze & Guattari 1994, 176)
With regard to David Foster Wallace’s writing, the stylistic characteristic of minor literature,
the deterritorialization of the major language is the most important one for this paper. An
author deterritorializes his language when he is like a foreigner in his language: ‘He makes
the language itself scream, stutter, stammer, or murmur’ (Deleuze 1997, 110). When a
language stutters, it will no longer be ‘meaningful, controllable or recognizable’ because it
has been detached from the order that originally gave it its meaning (Colebrook 2003, 59).
Minor authors therefore create
pass-words beneath order words; words that pass, words that are components of
passage, whereas order-words mark stoppages or organized, stratified compositions
(Deleuze & Guattari 2004, 110)
These order-words are part of the major language, they belong to ‘the dominant, orthodox
ways of classifying, organizing, and explaining the world’ (Bogue 2004, 71). Passage-words
on the order hand make the system shake and stutter, it makes the system take lines of
flight. Moreover, ‘the concept of style-as-stuttering (…) receives no fewer than eleven
characteristics’ (Lecercle 2002, 242).16
In Oblivion, Wallace’s language stutters and stammers in several ways. The most obvious
example of his deterritorialization can probably be found in the story “Incarnations of
Burned Children” (Wallace 2005, 114). This story, only three pages long, describes ‘the first
panic-stricken moments after parents discover their infant drenched by scalding water. Not
describes, really, but rather is’ (Benzon 2004). In this short story, a pot of boiling water has
fallen upon a little child. The first sentence tells us that ‘the Daddy was around the side of
16
These are: disequilibrium, variation, vibration, line, minority, inclusive disjunctions and reflexive connections,
repetition, digression, the intensive line of syntax, rhythm, and limit (Lecercle 2002, 242-244). Some of these will
be discussed with regard to Wallace’s style in chapter five.
22
the house hanging a door for the tenant when he heard the child’s screams and the
Mommy’s voice gone high between them’ (Wallace 2005, 114). When the Daddy entered, he
immediately lifted the child from the floor and let cold water run over him in the sink.
Afterwards, he put the child onto the table and covered the child in wet towels. However,
the child was wearing a diaper and only now do the parents notice
where the real water’d fallen and pooled and been burning their baby boy all this
time while he screamed for them to help him and they hadn’t, hadn’t thought and
when they got it off and saw the state of what was there the Mommy said their
God’s first name and grabbed the table to keep her feet while the father turned away
and threw a haymaker at the air of the kitchen and cursed both himself and the
world for not the last time while his child might now have been sleeping if not for the
rate of his breathing and the tiny stricken motions of his hands in the air above
where he lay, hands the size of a grown man’s thumb that had clutched the Daddy’s
thumb in the crib while he’d watched the Daddy’s mouth move in song, his head
cocked and seeming to see way past him into something his eyes made the Daddy
lonesome for in a sideways way (Wallace 2005, 116)
These sentences do not really describe the story, but rather performs the story, as Benzon
points out. In this story, Wallace makes his language stammer and stutter, because the
reactions, thoughts, feelings and actions all become intertwined in the language. The
parents have feelings of guilt and pain, while the child suffers from a physical pain. Similarly,
the reader is taken along with what happens in the story. The reader experiences the chaos
and the adrenalin that the parents must feel, but also the pain of the child while reading
these sentences. Reading this three-page story is a short and painful adrenalin rush.
Moreover, it is painful and chaotic not only because of its content, but also because of its
remarkable style and technique.
Wallace thus portrays his ability to make his language stammer, he shows us ‘a third
possibility: when saying is doing’ (Deleuze 1997, 107). A vitalistic author is able to send his
language along lines of flight so that the conventional grammar and syntax trembles. I only
briefly pointed out the stammering quality of Wallace’s language and what effects it can
23
evoke. However, in the following chapters I will show how Wallace is a vitalistic author who
is able to evoke his clinical diagnosis into his critical style and technique. As already
mentioned, a vitalistic author is able to represent his vitalism through his style and
technique, so that the reader can experience the effects his style evokes. These effects are
effects of difference and becoming, because his style represents a becoming. A great author
can evoke the greatest effect in a reader when saying becomes doing. In the ‘critical’ part of
chapter four, I will show how Wallace makes his language shake and stammer in “Mister
Squishy”. In the next chapter, I will discuss what can be regarded as the vitalism of Wallace’s
writing.
24
4. Wallace’s Vitalistic Resistance Against Irony
A vitalistic author should show an attempt to free life from what imprisons it. In this chapter,
I discuss Wallace’s vitalism which resonates in all of his writing. As a clinician of society, he
diagnosed a pain caused by the pervasiveness of irony in our literature, culture, television
and behavior. He therefore attempts to resist and go beyond irony, striving for a writing that
could display authenticity and sincerity. As a vitalist, Wallace aims to free life from the prison
of irony and point out new ways for literature and human beings. I will first discuss the
concept of irony and its function in postmodern literature. Furthermore, I will discuss
Deleuze’s ‘superior irony’ or ‘humour’, in which he rejects an ironic point of view from above
and prefers to descend to the forces of life. I will then discuss Wallace’s vitalistic resistance
irony with regard to his essay “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (1993) and a
1993 interview with Larry McCaffery. In this essay-interview nexus, which has already been
widely discussed, Wallace resists irony and urges for a new type of writing that should bring
back sincerity and authenticity. Moreover, I will discuss Wallace’s own writing as a form of
superior irony. In the last part of this chapter I will show how “Good Old Neon” represents a
vitalistic multiplicity of irony and sincerity.
25
4.1. (Postmodern) Irony
Irony is a complex concept but it does have a common, frequently used definition: ‘saying
what is contrary to what is meant’ (Quintilian as quoted in Colebrook 2004, 1) 17. Through the
use of irony, one can make a distinction between the meaning of what is said and what is
actually meant. Irony therefore creates a judgmental point from above, another voice next
to what is being expressed. Irony is also central in our own time and ‘many have argued that
our entire epoch, as postmodern, is ironic’ (Colebrook 2004, 18)18. The term postmodern,
which can be used ‘as a means of thinking about the contemporary world, (…) evokes ideas
of irony, disruption, difference, discontinuity, playfulness, parody, hyper-reality and
simulation’ (Malpas 2005, 6-7).19 In this ironic era, the traditional definition of irony also
refers
to the huge problems of postmodernity; our very historical context is ironic because
today nothing really means what it says. We live in a world of quotation, pastiche,
simulation and cynicism: a general and all-encompassing irony (Colebrook 2004, 1)
The irony in our postmodern era, or postmodern irony, dominates our culture and evokes
the sense that everything is quoted, unoriginal and insincere, ‘we no longer share common
values and assumptions, nor do we believe there is a truth or reason behind our values’
(Colebrook 2004, 18). Postmodern irony affirms ‘the equal validity and ultimately groundless
nature of all discourse' (Colebrook 2003, 121)20.
In a postmodern world, there are no longer superior viewpoints, underlying meanings or
meta-narratives. In postmodern literature, authors such as John Barth and Thomas Pynchon
17
Quintilian 1995-98 [9.2.33], 401
‘Eco 1992; Hassan 1987, 91-92; Hutcheon 1994; Mileur 1998, Sim 2002; Wilde 1980’ (Colebrook 2004, 18)
19 19
In this chapter, I use the term postmodern or postmodernism: ‘the term “postmodern” tends to be
employed in critical writing in two key ways: either as “postmodernism” or “postmodernity”. (…) Broadly
speaking, postmodernism has tended to focus on questions of style and artistic representation and
postmodernity has been employed to designate a specific cultural context or historical epoch’ (Malpas 2005, 9).
20
Claire Colebrook is the central reference in this chapter and I argue she is a justifiable and useful reference for
the subject of irony and Gilles Deleuze. She has written Irony (the New Critical Idiom) (2004) and numerous
books and essays on Gilles Deleuze, including Gilles Deleuze (2003) as part of the series Routledge Thinkers.
18
26
have used metafiction as an expression of this postmodern irony. They challenged the
reader’s suspension of disbelief by pointing out that their stories are mediated illusions
imposed upon their readers. By doing so, they imply that any sense of truthfulness is difficult
to achieve, both in literature and in life. As I will discuss later on, Wallace argued how this
resulted in a literature that never really meant what it said. Postmodern irony pervaded our
culture and society and left us in a world of groundlessness, where no ‘speech act could be
legitimated, justified or grounded’ (Colebrook 2004, 154).
Postmodernism can be regarded as a ‘radical rejection or redefinition of irony’, which results
in a postmodern irony of groundlessness (Colebrook 2004, 164). However, Claire Colebrook
points out that postmodernism can also be regarded ‘as the impossibility of overcoming
irony’ (Colebrook 2004, 164). In its rejection of irony, postmodernism also shows that it
cannot go beyond the basic definition of irony: ‘any attempt to reduce the world to
discourses, contexts, language games or relative points of view would itself generate a point
of view of recognition’ (Colebrook 2004, 164-65). In postmodern texts, we encounter how
the detachment from an ironic point of view, generates another point of view: ‘this
unintended contradiction (…) is manifestly exploited in much postmodern ironic literature’
(Colebrook 2004, 167). Colebrook therefore argues that this provides us with two different
ways of thinking about postmodernism and postmodern irony. The first regards
postmodernism in the traditional way as
a movement that “quotes”, “mentions” or repeats styles, but without any sense of a
proper or privileged style, and with a sense that one set of concepts is no more
‘proper’ or grounded than another’ (Hutcheon 1996; Rorty 1989)21 (Colebrook 2000,
103)
Against this postmodernism of quotation, pastiche and simulation, Colebrook argues for a
second way of thinking about postmodernism. This type of postmodernism
would preclude recognition, such that the postmodern would be more than the shock
of the new and more than the retracing of the present. It would problematize not just
21 21
A quote in which Colebrook refers to Linda Hutcheon and Richard Rorty, two authors who wrote extensively
on postmodernism and irony.
27
a specific style, genre or meaning of the present but the problem of meaning or sense
in general (Colebrook 2000, 103)
Colebrook argues that we can find such a line of thought in Deleuze’s approach to irony. He
resists the hierarchical point of view in traditional irony, but he also rejects a postmodern
irony in which we never really mean what we say. Gilles Deleuze takes ‘the necessity
recognized by the tradition of irony to new possibilities’ (Colebrook 2004, 169)
4.2. Humour or Superior Irony
Gilles Deleuze’s approach to irony is both similar to and different from postmodern irony.
Similar to postmodern irony, he rejects the superior point of view in traditional irony. While
irony is powerful because it is able to expose hypocrisy and challenge norms and
conventions, it also creates a hierarchical point of view above life. Deleuze rejects the ironic
movement of ascent and prefers a movement of descent with his concept of ‘humour’:
The first way of overturning the law is ironic, where irony appears as an art of
principles, of ascent towards the principles and of overturning principles. The second
is humour which is an art of consequences and descents, of suspensions and falls
(Deleuze 2004a, 5-6)
Deleuze prefers humour, which does not construct hierarchical viewpoints because ‘humour
is the art of the surface, which is opposed to the old irony, the art of depths and heights’
(Deleuze 2004b, 11). With his concept of humour, Deleuze rejects the ironic ‘tendency to not
rest with the world in all its flux of difference, a tendency to posit some ultimate point of
view beyond difference’ (Colebrook 2004, 135). For Deleuze, irony or ironic literature can
never be vitalistic because it is cruel to life, it ‘produces a viewpoint that surveys the whole,
that derides or chastens everyday life and desire’ (Colebrook 2004, 143). Instead, he prefers
‘humour beyond irony, or what Deleuze refers to as superior irony’ (Colebrook 2004, 132).
Superior irony focuses on the forces of life, it ‘insists on the singular pulsations of life, the
capacity of life to become different, to destroy and prompt our concepts and categories’
(Colebrook 2004, 133). Instead of the ironic movement of ascent, Deleuze prefers humour
28
which descends to ‘the singularities of life that have no order, no high and low, no before
and after’ (Colebrook 2004, 136).
Deleuze therefore shares with postmodernism a rejection of the hierarchical viewpoint of
irony. However, the concept of humour does oppose the type of postmodern irony that
reduces life ‘to one undifferentiated plane of relative values’ (Colebrook 2004, 150). For
Deleuze, this postmodern rejection and redefinition of irony is not at all revolutionary
because it still subordinates forces of difference and becoming ‘to some general standard or
point of value’ (Colebrook 2004, 150). In doing so, he aligns with the poststructuralist
reaction to irony, as ‘post-structuralism recognizes that one cannot speak from a position of
groundlessness’ (Colebrook 2004, 121). Deleuze’s superior irony or humour can be said to
oppose ‘to the poetics of “post-modern” irony’ (Colebrook 2004, 150). Deleuze rejects a
postmodern irony in which we have ‘replaced reality with simulation and the hyperreal’
(Malpas 2005, 122). He rejects the idea that we only live in a world of images, copies and
simulacra. For Deleuze,
the simulacrum or image is real, and life is and always has been simulation – a power
of production, creating, becoming and difference. The idea that all we have are mere
representations or constructions of the world seems to posit some real world that is
lost or unavailable. Whether we mourn or celebrate the postmodern loss of the real,
both models assume that the simulacrum is not real, a mere copy. The simulacrum
for Deleuze, however, (…) is not the loss or abandonment of the real; it is the real
(Colebrook 2003, 101)22
From a Deleuzian viewpoint, literature is therefore no longer limited to quoting or copying
without ever being able to portray the real. Instead, literature has the vitalistic power to
express life, it is always able to produce ‘new simulations, new expressions of the real’
(Colebrook 2003, 101). For Deleuze, the impossibility of structuring the forces of life is not a
22
In this quote, Deleuze’s thought follows Friedrich Nietzsche along a path ‘of a perpetually decentered
perspectivism’ (Colebrook 2000, 102). This line of thought neither implies that we only experience the world
through points of view, nor does it suggest a form of nihilism, exclaiming that there is no real. Instead, they
argue that ‘each point of view is the affirmation of its own infinite world: not a point within the real, but the real
itself’ (Colebrook 2000, 101). This can also be described as Deleuze’s ‘logic of immanence’, in which ‘the event of
the given is nothing other than itself, and not the givenness of some grounding presence’ (Colebrook 2003, 120).
29
loss. Instead, it means ‘that we are given the opportunity to invent, create and experiment.
Deleuze asks us to grasp this opportunity, to accept the challenge to transform life’
(Colebrook 2003, 2). When literature is able to display this sense of humour or superior
irony, it descends to the forces and flows of life without trying to structure or form them.
Humour allows ‘the chaos of life and difference to disrupt any elevated value’ (Colebrook
2004, 151).
4.3. The Literature of Superior Irony
Great literature for Deleuze, should represent a liberation from the subjection of irony.
Deleuze therefore prefers ‘post-ironic literature, or the literature of superior irony’
(Colebrook 2004, 39). In these stories, Deleuze encounters becomings ‘that lie beyond the
subject, all the points of view that lie beyond the grammar and logic of human
representation’ (Colebrook 2004, 139). Deleuze rejected the ironic point of view because he
argued that before someone says something, there are always ‘problems, perceptions,
desires, or “planes” of sense that enable some system of logic to emerge’ (Colebrook 2004,
131).
Post-ironic literature is able to show ‘subjects to be collections of sounds, gestures, body
parts and signs devoid of any real sense’ (Colebrook 2004, 139). It goes beyond traditional
irony which supposes that ‘it is through speaking that we have the sense of a subject who
preceded speech and an original world that was there to be signified’ (Colebrook 2004, 133).
Instead, the subject for Deleuze becomes a collection of forces, flows of desire, movements
and becomings. According to Deleuze, too much of modern fiction is concerned with the
subject or “man” which produces ‘that point of view elevated above life and detached from
any specific body’ (Colebrook 2004, 147). As I have already mentioned, great literature
therefore displays a becoming-animal which ‘allows all the repressed and meaningless drives
of the body to disrupt sense’ (Colebrook 2004, 151).
30
This is why Deleuze admired the modernist stream of consciousness technique, in which
authors are able to portray feelings and desires of characters without a fixed point of view.23
The language becomes an expression of a whole range of forces, it becomes a multiplicity:
‘Instead of the enormous opposition between the one and the many, there is only the
variety of multiplicity – in other words, difference’ (Deleuze 2004a, 182). Such a language is
able to disrupt time because it represents ‘a time before meaning and sense, a time of
differing durations and perceptions’ (Colebrook 2004, 139). This is why, for example,
Deleuze regarded Samuel Beckett’s plays as a form of humour because ‘we laugh when the
order of time and explanation no longer holds’ (Colebrook 2004, 136). Irony is focused on
what we actually mean, while ‘humour presents us with what we cannot say’ (Colebrook
2004, 137). Deleuze therefore assigned a counter-ironic task to himself and authors ‘not to
produce a point of view above and beyond life, but to see life itself as a humourous or
joyous multiplicity of incommensurable perceptions’ (Colebrook 2004, 14).
I will argue that Wallace represents a similar rejection of irony because it is hostile towards
life. He points out new lines of flight beyond postmodern irony for literature and life.
Wallace’s movement beyond irony will prove to be a similar type of ‘superior’ irony that
represents life in all its forces and multiplicities.
23
Deleuze describes this style as ‘free-indirect style’, which ‘is not a way of speaking that describes something
external; it is a way of being in itself’ (Colebrook 2000, 121). The language in free-indirect style is not necessarily
owned by a character or the author, it is in its own. Free-indirect style does not represent concepts or words
that can be recognized and placed within a structure. Instead, ‘we are given highly particular, located,
idiosyncratic ways of speaking’ (Colebrook 2000, 123). Free-indirect style therefore does not simply describe
something, but it is a mode of being in itself: ‘in free-indirect style, characters or points of view are produced
through ways of speaking’ (Colebrook 2000, 122). Still, it is important to remember that what Deleuze ‘affirmed
was not a certain style- the free-indirect style of modernism- but the event of style. We need to confront style as
that which produces, rather than expresses, thought (…) Confronting style’s effective dimension is the challenge
of Deleuze’s thought’ (Colebrook 2000, 128-130).
31
4.4. Wallace’s Resistance against Irony
In his essay, “E Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction” (1993)24, Wallace elaborates his
resistance against irony. Similar to Deleuze, Wallace regards irony as negative and lifedenying. As a clinician, he diagnosed how irony as initial tool of postmodern literature, had
seeped into television and our contemporary society. In his essay, Wallace therefore
diagnoses irony as a contemporary illness, ‘the TV essay’s really about how poisonous
postmodern irony’s become’ (McCaffery 2012, 48). As a true vitalist, Wallace aims to free us
from the prison of postmodern irony by creating new possibilities for literature and life.
Moreover, Wallace’s new way out is a form of ‘superior irony’ that descends to the
multiplicity of the different forces in life. In his writing, we encounter both forces of irony
and authenticity.
In “E Unibus”, David Foster Wallace reacts against the pervasiveness of irony in our literature
and culture. He argues that ‘the nexus where television and fiction converse and consort is
self-conscious irony’ (Wallace 1998, 35). Wallace states that
irony and ridicule are entertaining and effective, and that at the same time they are
agents of a great despair and stasis in U.S. culture, and that for aspiring fiction writers
they pose especially terrible problems (Wallace 1998, 49)
Irony, ridicule and self-reflexivity were initially tools that ‘the literary insurgents of Beat and
postmodernism, used so effectively to rebel against their own world and context’ (Wallace
1998, 52). These authors argued how people lived in ‘the prison of naïve belief’ and they
used irony to offer their readers the freedom ‘of the cynic to see hypocrisy wherever it was
at work’ (Boswell 2003, 13). However, irony and cynicism have been adopted by television
‘to such an extent that these same strategies had been sapped of their revolutionary power’
(Boswell 2003, 13). Wallace therefore argues that the initial belief in postmodern irony was
too idealistic: ‘it was assumed that etiology and diagnosis pointed toward cure, that a
revelation of imprisonment led to freedom’ (Wallace 1998, 66-67). While he acknowledged
24
Quotes from A Supposedly fun thing I’ll Never Do Again: essays and arguments, 21-81. London, Abacus, 1998
32
that irony is useful for revealing hypocrisies and providing a diagnosis, he also argued how
most of the ‘illusion-debunking in the U.S. has now been done and redone’ (McCaffery 2012
48).
Wallace therefore portrays a vitalism similar to Deleuze’s in his rejection of irony. Where
Deleuze said that irony is enslaving because it sets ‘itself up in judgment of life’ (Colebrook
2004, 149), Wallace argues that irony can never be a liberating tool because ‘irony’s gone
from liberating to enslaving’ (McCaffery 2012, 49). What postmodernist authors ‘saw as
liberation – the demolition of a false and oppressive prisonhouse of belief – Wallace
experienced as a source of suffering’ (Konstantinou 2012, 88). Wallace can thus be aligned
with Deleuze’s stance towards irony when he writes that irony is
not a rhetorical mode that wears well (…) because irony, entertaining as it is, serves
an almost exclusively negative function. It’s critical and destructive, a groundclearing.
Surely this is the way our postmodern fathers saw it. But irony’s singularly unuseful
when it comes to constructing anything to replace the hypocrisies it debunks
(Wallace 1998, 66)
He regarded irony as life-denying but the problem was that it pervaded the culture around
him. Literature and television had become:
immune to charges that [they lack] any meaningful connection to the world outside
it. It’s not that charges of nonconnection have become untrue. It’s that any such
connection has become otiose (Wallace 1998, 33)
He acknowledged that he could not simply protest or diagnose the pervasiveness of
postmodern irony, because television was ‘able to capture and neutralize any attempt to
change or even protest the attitudes of passive unease and cynicism that television requires
of Audience’ (50). Wallace therefore needed to point out a new way for writing, a way to go
beyond the postmodern irony of his forefathers.
In “E Unibus” and in his own writing, Wallace portrays a vitalistic attempt to free literature
and life from the prison of irony. As a vitalist, Wallace reacted against the work of
33
contemporary authors (such as Mark Leyner’s fiction), which was ‘doomed to shallowness by
its desire to ridicule a culture whose mockery of itself and all value already absorbs all
ridicule’ (Wallace 1998, 81). Wallace felt he had to provide a new way out for literature, a
new possibility of life, because other authors were only ‘contributing unwittingly to the
ruling obsession with hip nihilism, “value-neutral” morality and an essentially ironic response
to life’s challenges’ (Baskin 2009). Instead, Wallace argued how great art should portray both
the wrongs of society and provide new possibilities for life.25 As a vitalistic author and a
clinician of civilization, Wallace argued that literature was only displaying an ‘ironic diagnosis
of unpleasantness instead of an ambition not just to diagnose and ridicule but to redeem’
(McCaffery 2012, 49). This clearly resembles what Deleuze valued in great literature, its
vitalism to free life from what imprisons it. Wallace argued that literature should ‘dare to try
talk about ways of working toward redeeming what’s wrong’ (McCaffery 2012, 48-49).
In “E Unibus”, Wallace pointed out new ways for authors: ‘The next real literary “reels” in
this country might well emerge as some weird bunch of anti-rebels, born ogles who dare
somehow to back away from ironic watching’ (Wallace 1998, 81). These writers would resist
against the tyranny of the ironic point of view, and bring back a certain sincerity that is true
to life. In doing so, they react against the impossibility of meaning, sincerity and authenticity
that pervaded in postmodern culture. Wallace argued how the implied meaning of irony,
made any attempt to be true to life impossible: ‘Most likely, I think today’s irony ends up
saying: “How totally banal of you to ask what I really mean”’ (67). Instead, Wallace urged for
a certain ‘naïveté’ in literature, a form of authenticity and sincerity that seemed so hard to
achieve in literature and life. This naïveté can be described as
A willingness to disclose yourself, open yourself up in spiritual and emotional ways
that risk making you look banal or melodramatic or naïve or unhip or sappy, and to
ask the reader really to feel something (McCaffery 2012, 50)
In a world dominated by ironic distance, this line of thought might seem naïve, but in
essence, it is a vitalistic attempt to provide new ways for living. Wallace wanted to do away
25
As I mentioned in the previous chapter, Wallace argued that ‘really good fiction could have as dark a
worldview as it wished, but it’d find a way both to depict this dark world and to illuminate the possibilities for
being alive and human in it’ (McCaffery 2012, 26).
34
with the ironic distance in literature because he felt that it was the task of authors and
artists ‘to offer counsel on questions of judgment, emotion and truth’ (Baskin 2009).
However, it is important to note that Wallace’s vitalistic move forward does not simply
‘embrace some simple return to a pre-ironic sensibility’ (Konstantinou 2012, 85). While in “E
Unibus”, Wallace seems to call for an anti-ironic writer who returns to authenticity, his own
fiction portrays a vitalism that aims to ‘forge ahead in hopes of breaking through to the
other side, whatever that might be’ (Scott, 2000). A.O. Scott described Wallace’s writing as
‘meta-ironic’, ‘to make his fiction relentlessly conscious of its own self-consciousness, and
thus to produce work that will be at once unassailably sophisticated and doggedly down to
earth’ (Scott 2000). While A.O. Scott is right that Wallace is both sophisticated and down to
earth, I agree with Konstantinou that the term meta-ironic, ‘incorrectly suggest that
Wallace’s fiction performs yet another iteration in an endless process of ironic commentary,
turning irony back destructively onto itself’ (Konstantinou 2012, 90-91). A.O. Scott’s term
seems to imply that Wallace ‘is engaging in yet another turn of metafiction’s ironic dialectic’
(Konstantinou 2012, 90). Instead, Konstantinou prefers to describe Wallace’s writing as
‘postirony’, because of his ‘effort to decouple the academic and cultural association between
metafictional form and ironic knowingness and cynicism’ (91).26 As Konstantinou points out,
‘metafiction is a form of irony because, like irony, it forces the reader/subject to ceaselessly
question all grounds for understanding’ (89). The result of metafiction is therefore that it
does not undermine ‘this or that belief, but belief as such’ (Konstantinou 2012, 90). Because
of this connotation of metafiction, it becomes hard to belief any type of literature.
Konstantinou therefore correctly argues that it is the postironist’s ‘attempt to use
metafictional forms as a way of reconnecting form and content’ (90). A postironist tries to
revive belief and I will argue that Wallace portrays an attempt to revive a belief in
authenticity and sincerity by means of metafiction and irony.
26
A coincidental similarity to Deleuze’s ‘post-ironic literature, or the literature of superior irony’ (Colebrook
2004, 39)
35
Wallace presents a remarkable multiplicity in his writing: ‘Wallace himself defines the
multiplicity he wants to embody as a joining of “cynicism and naïveté”’ (Boswell 2003, 16).
Wallace understood that he could not abandon irony and he therefore ‘recognized it as a
means rather than an end’ (Baskin 2009). In this regard, his vitalistic writing is a Deleuzian
multiplicity of both irony and authenticity. Wallace incorporates irony and metafiction in
order to go beyond them and move towards a path of ‘naïve’ authenticity. Wallace reacted
against postmodernism, the ‘postironic response (…) is to attempt to demonstrate that the
form of metafiction can produce the opposite effect: belief’ (Konstantinou 2012, 93).
Wallace is a writer of multiplicities and he described this type of multiplicity as a ‘bothness’
with regard to film director David Lynch.27 His writing style displays a similar’ bothness’ in
which ‘postmodern vistas familiar from the works of, say, Don DeLillo are crossed with a
more traditional investment in human emotion and sentiment' (Giles 2007, 330). The
problem critics and readers encounter with regard to Wallace’s bothness, is that they might
wonder if his work represents ‘an unusually trenchant critique of that culture or one of its
most florid and exotic symptoms?’ (Scott 2000). It is certainly true that his fiction both
consists of and resists against the ‘self-centered self-absorbed culture of late-twentiethcentury America’ (Max 2012, 255). However, A.O. Scott gives an answer to his own question,
acknowledging Wallace’s multiplicity: ‘Of course, there can only be one answer: it's both’
(Scott 2000). Wallace’s multiplicity descends to the forces of our contemporary lives by
representing the struggle to achieve a certain level of authenticity and sincerity in a
postmodern ironic world. His own writing represents a vitalistic way out, a style beyond
postmodernism and realism, ‘a third approach, uncomfortable but sincere realism for a
world that was no longer real’ (Max 2012, 231). In the last part of this chapter, I will discuss
Wallace’s vitalistic multiplicity or bothness with regard to the story “Good Old Neon”. 28 I will
27
‘And we hate this possibility in movies; we hate this “both” shit. “Both” comes off as sloppy characterization,
muddy filmmaking, lack of focus. … But I submit that the real reason we criticized and disliked Lynch’s Laura’s
muddy bothness is that it required of us an empathetic confrontation with the exact same muddy bothness in
ourselves and our intimates that makes the real world of moral selves so tense and uncomfortable, a bothness
we go to the movies to get a couple hours’ fucking relief from’ (Wallace 1998a)
28
Wallace even acknowledged the remarks of A.O. Scott’s Panic of Influence regarding his multiplicity. While he
was writing a draft version of “Good Old Neon”, he wrote in the margins: ‘AO Scott saw into my character’
(Wallace as quoted in Max 2012, 255).
36
show how it displays a multiplicity of both irony and sincerity which can be regarded as a
form of Deleuzian humour or superior irony.
4.5. Superior Irony and Multiplicity in “Good Old Neon”
In “Good Old Neon”, the main protagonist, Neal, admits: ‘My whole life I’ve been a fraud’
(Wallace 2005, 141). Because of his fraudulence, he has committed suicide and throughout
the story, or monologue, Neal recounts the events and experiences that have led to his
suicide. Moreover, he promises us that ‘it gets a lot more interesting when I get to the part
where I kill myself and discover what happens immediately after a person dies’ (143). Neal is
a highly (self-) aware person, who has an ironic point of view towards life. He makes it
almost unable for himself to be sincere because he views everything in an ironic way. His
whole life, Neal wanted to impress other people, ‘mostly to be liked or admired’ (141). For
example, while he was making out with his first girlfriend, he could not even feel ‘the soft
aliveness or whatever of her breast’ (141). All Neal could think of was: ’Now I’m the guy that
Mead let get to second with her’ (141). Gradually, Neal became aware of his own
fraudulence and how he suffered from what he calls the ‘fraudulence paradox’:
The fraudulence paradox was that the more time and effort you put into trying to
appear impressive or attractive to other people, the less impressive or attractive you
felt inside – you were a fraud. And the more of a fraud you felt like, the harder you
tried to convey an impressive or likable image of yourself so that other people
wouldn’t find out what a hollow, fraudulent person you really were (147)
The more Neal was caught in his own ironic and self-conscious web, the more he felt like a
fraud, until he decided to kill himself. The story therefore recounts how Neal failed to
achieve a belief in the possibility of sincerity and authenticity because he lived in a
postmodern ironic world where nobody really means what he says. Moreover, he judged
himself for never being sincere and authentic. “Good Old Neon” therefore consists of sixty
pages of Neal analyzing his own fraudulence. For example, he told his psychoanalyst
37
about the period of trying jogging, during which I seemed never to fail to have to
increase my pace and pump my arms more vigorously whenever someone drove by
or looked up from his yard, so that I ended up with bone spurs and eventually had to
quit altogether (158)
Neal is a part of the postmodern ironic world, desperately wanting to be authentic and
sincere while nobody seems able to be sincere. Furthermore, while he has lost the faith in
any meaning because of the groundlessness of it all, he still constructs his own postmodern
ironic point of view that judges and enslaves life. This is reflected in a passage where Neal
tries to write a suicide note to his sister, Fern:
Even as I wrote my note to Fern, for instance, expressing sentiments and regrets that
were real, a part of me was noticing what a fine and sincere note it was, and
anticipating the effect on Fern of this or that heartfelt phrase, while yet another part
was observing the whole scene of a man in a dress shirt and no tie sitting at his
breakfast nook writing a heartfelt note on his last afternoon alive, (…) this part of me
sort of hovering above and just to the left of myself, evaluating the scene, and
thinking what a fine and genuine-seeming performance in a drama it would make if
only we all had not already been subject to countless scenes just like it in dramas
ever since we first saw a movie or read a book, which somehow entailed that real
scenes like the one of my suicide note were now compelling and genuine only to their
participants, and to anyone else would come off as banal and even somewhat cheesy
or maudlin, which is somewhat paradoxical when you consider – as I did, setting
there at the breakfast nook – that the reason scenes like this will seem stale or
manipulative to an audience is that we’ve already seen so many of them in dramas,
and yet the reason we’ve seen so many of them in dramas is that the scenes really
are dramatic and compelling and let people communicate very deep, complicated
emotional realities that are almost impossible to articulate in any other way, and at
the same time still another facet or part of me realizing that from this perspective my
own basic problem was that at an early age I’d somehow chosen to cast my lot with
my life’s drama’s supposed audience instead of with the drama itself, and that I even
now was watching and gauging my supposed performance’s quality and probable
38
effects, and thus was in the final analysis the very same manipulative fraud writing
the note to Fern that I had been throughout the life that had brought me to this
climactic scene (175-176)
The sentence goes on, but I argue that this passage clearly reflects how Wallace’s vitalistic
flight beyond irony culminates in a multiplicity that resembles a form of superior irony. Neal
realizes his feelings are sincere, but he is caught up in a postmodern ironic viewpoint that
makes it impossible for anybody or anything to be sincere. He nevertheless expresses a
sense of the superior irony because he argues how all the simulacra and copies of our
postmodern irony are still real and express life. For Deleuze, ‘the simulacrum (…) is not the
loss or abandonment of the real; it is the real’ (Colebrook 2003, 101). Similarly, Neal argues
how ‘the scenes really are dramatic and compelling and let people communicate very deep,
complicated emotional realities’ (Wallace 2005, 176). The story therefore shows how in
superior irony, fraudulence and sincerity are able to co-exist because they express the real
together as a multiplicity.
In “Good Old Neon” Wallace clearly reacts against postmodern irony and ‘took issue with
what had become the habitual postmodern announcement that there were no longer any
subjects’ (Baskin 2009). Instead, Wallace’s subjects and characters are shown to be a
collection of desires and affects that can contradict each other. Neal is a character of
paradoxes, of his own fraudulence paradox, and of forces that are both sincere and ironic.
The story succeeds in going beyond irony because it portrays Neal’s sincere expression of his
own fraudulence. This story shows how Wallace ‘labored to return literary fiction to the
deep problems of subjective experience’ (Baskin 2009). The subjective experience that he
portrays in this story, is that of an authentic and sincere character who feels and acts like a
fraud. By regarding “Good Old Neon” as a form of superior irony, I am able to counter critics,
such as Kakutani, who argued that Wallace
all too often settles for the sort of self-indulgent prattling (…) and the cheap brand of
irony and ridicule that he once denounced in an essay as “agents of great despair and
stasis in U.S. culture” (Kakutani 2004)
39
Instead, this endless self-conscious and ironic babbling of Neal, is necessary ‘in order to fully
characterize the traps in which some people find themselves’ (Benzon 2004). Wallace’s
fiction features more than ‘claustrophobic portraits of self-pitying, self-absorbed individuals
who are endlessly long-winded’ (Kakutani 2004).
Wallace shows us a character enslaved by a postmodern ironic way of thinking. The story
shows how ‘all our satire, theory and reflexive sophistication have not added up to an exit
strategy’ (Baskin 2009). As a vitalistic author, Wallace therefore aims to point out another
possibility for life by regarding it as a multiplicity of difference. Neal decided to kill himself
because of all ‘the infinities you can never show another soul’ (179). He felt like a fraud
because he was never truly authentic or sincere. In Neal’s character, Wallace shows the
danger of the ironic ascent. Neal
set one unreachable standard – 100 percent authenticity – and judged all his actions
according to it. Therefore all his actions meant only one thing: that he was
inauthentic, a fraud (Baskin 2009)
By trying to impose a standard or norm to the fluxes of life, Neal inevitably felt like a fraud.
But meanwhile, the reader is shown how Neal is still a sincere human being even though he
feels like a fraud. Wallace thus shows us how the pervasiveness of postmodern irony can
lead to a loss of the belief in any truthfulness, authenticity or realness. The story reflects
how in our society the ‘obsession with fraudulence and authenticity has acquired the
configuration of neurosis’ (Baskin 2009).
The story displays a form of superior irony because Neal is shown to be an authentic person,
a multiplicity of different forces. Through Neal’s character, the reader is shown how
fraudulence and ironic detachment from meaning ‘can exist alongside generosity, freedom
and truth’ (Baskin 2009). Wallace therefore writes in a form of superior irony by descending
down to the forces of life:
40
Rather than allowing his characters an estranged perspective on the degradations of
commercial culture (…), Wallace positions his dramatis personae as caught up
inexorably in the belly of the beast (Giles 2007, 332)
Furthermore, while the reader is shown how irony and sincerity can co-exist, Wallace also
offers an explicit attempt at providing new possibilities for life. He wants us to realize that
we shouldn’t worry whether we are actually fraudulous or authentic because the story and
Neal’s character should convince us of ‘the poverty of this question, and of the deleterious
strategies we have depended on to avoid moving beyond it’ (Baskin 2009). Wallace displays
a straightforward attempt at a vitalistic advice, he explicitly points out a new possibility for
life:
And you think it makes you a fraud, the tiny fraction anyone else ever sees? Of course
you’re a fraud, of course what people see is never you. And of course you know this,
and of course you try to manage what part they see if you know it’s only a part. Who
wouldn’t? It’s called free will, Sherlock. But at the same time it’s why it feels so good
to break down and cry in front of others, or to laugh, or speak in tongues, or chant in
Bengali – it’s not English anymore, it’s not getting squeezed through any hole
(Wallace 2005, 179)
From a Deleuzian perspective, this explicit attempt is not convincing enough. It is a sincere
attempt that is only a part of the multiplicity. It is not a form of superior irony that can
convince the reader because it becomes a judgmental point of view itself. The portrayal of
Neal’s character is convincing because we are shown that irony and sincerity can co-exist.
The story gives us a sixty page monologue of someone who shows us more fractions of
himself than anyone probably ever saw. The reader therefore already regards Neal as an
authentic character even though Neal himself thinks he is a fraud. This explicit and sincere
attempt is only a part of the multiplicity because it can never really convey all the forces of
life in its entirety: ‘words and chronological time create all these total misunderstandings of
what’s really going on at the most basic level’ (Wallace 2005, 151).
On a metafictional level, Wallace is also able to portray his ‘bothness’. While “Good Old
Neon” mostly features Neal’s monologue, near the end of the story it is suddenly mentioned
41
that ‘David Wallace blinks in the midst of idly scanning class photos from his 1980 Aurora
West H.S. yearbook’ (Wallace 2005, 180). We are told that David Wallace saw Neal’s photo
in the yearbook and then tried ‘through the tiny little keyhole of himself, to imagine what all
must have happened to lead up to my death in the fiery single-car accident he’d read about
in 1991’ (180). It is therefore suggested that the entire story is actually ‘David Wallace’ trying
to imagine whatever ‘must have driven him [Neal] to kill himself in such a dramatic and
doubtlessly painful way’ (181).29 But it is David Foster Wallace himself writing and therefore
imagining this fictional story. By introducing ‘David Wallace’, David Foster Wallace
Pulls away the “fourth” wall of the fictional world of his story revealing that what
readers were led to believe was fiction (and specifically postmodern metafiction) may
in fact be a kind of meta-nonfiction (Konstantinou 2012, 98)
The reader is confronted with a story that shows a vitalistic way out of postmodern irony by
showing how the act of writing can be both fraudulent and sincere. The story or the author
himself is guilty of fraudulence, but the attempt at imagining what has happened to Neal, is
still sincere and authentic. We are told that ‘David Wallace’ is
also fully aware that the cliché that you can’t ever truly know what’s going on inside
somebody else is hoary and insipid and yet at the same time trying very consciously
to prohibit that awareness from mocking the attempt or sending the whole line of
thought into the sort of inbent spiral that keeps you from ever getting anywhere
(181)
In other words, ‘David Wallace’ is fighting against the postmodern irony that suggests that
we only have clichés, repetitions, simulations, relative values and an impossibility of
earnestness. For ‘David Wallace’, this postmodern ironic line of thought is life-denying
because it would only mock at his attempt at trying to know someone. Instead, we are told
that ‘David Wallace’ tried to go beyond the limitations of postmodern irony, which is why we
are given a story (or the imagination) that goes beyond it. The reader is confronted with a
story that is both ironic and sincere, both earnest and fraudulent, it is both fiction and
29
There are other moments throughout the monologue of Neal that already point forward to the metafictional
ending. For example, Neal mentions that ‘it doesn’t matter what you think about me, because despite
appearances this isn’t even really about me’ (152). Moreover, he argues that he is only explaining what has
happened in order to show ‘why it had the impact it did on who this is really about’ (152)
42
metafiction. With “Good Old Neon”, Wallace shows us that ‘a sense of fraudulence, of falling
short of authenticity, is endemic to contemporary man, just as it is endemic to contemporary
art’ (Baskin 2009). The reader is never able to entirely decide between either the fictional,
metafictional or nonfictional aspects of this story. Instead, the reader has to accept that this
story is a multiplicity, just like Neal could have stayed alive if he had felt that he was a
multiplicity of sincerity and fraudulence.
Good Old Neon” therefore closely aligns with the challenges that Wallace had put forth in “E
Unibus Pluram”. The attempt to go beyond postmodern irony is reflected here on both a
human and artistic level. Wallace shows us a new possibility of living and writing that frees
us from the prison of postmodern irony. We are shown the forces of life in all its power of
difference and multiplicity. We are reminded of the danger of ironic ascent and even given
the explicit advice to confront life in all its multiplicities. However, “Good Old Neon”
presents its superior irony and its multiplicity only through its content and characters. We
are shown a bothness in the story, in Neal’s character and in the act of writing. However, I
argue that the reader is still too much of a spectator, watching how Wallace shows us a way
beyond postmodern irony. I therefore agree with Benzon that ‘possibilities for emancipation
from inertia and systematic embitterment are advanced in other stories, more covertly, on
the level of narrative structure’ (Benzon 2004). In the next chapter, I will argue how “Mister
Squishy” comes closer to a form of superior irony. In this story, Wallace’s vitalistic resistance
against irony resonates in a more focused clinical diagnosis. Furthermore, I will discuss how
this clinical diagnosis is intertwined with Wallace’s style and technique. In “Mister Squishy”
the reader is no longer a spectator, but he experiences both Wallace’s clinical diagnosis and
his new possibilities for life. “Mister Squishy” is a story that evokes forces of difference and
multiplicity through Wallace’s style and technique. I will argue that in “Mister Squishy”,
Wallace truly succeeds in establishing his own critical and clinical project.
43
5. Wallace’s Clinical and Critical Project in “Mister Squishy”
In this chapter, I will discuss how Wallace’s attempt to make the head throb heart-like is
constructed as a Deleuzian clinical and critical project. Wallace wants his readers to become
aware of his clinical diagnosis and ethical demands (the heart) and he evokes this awareness
through the critical or his style and technique (the head). In his stories, Wallace first has to
diagnose before he can provide new possibilities for life, ‘since any possible human
redemption requires us first to face what’s dreadful, what we want to deny’ (McCaffery
2012, 32). I discuss what can be regarded as the central clinical diagnosis of Oblivion.
Wallace diagnoses how our contemporary existence is often characterized by a struggle
between oblivion or forgetfulness and awareness. Either people fall into oblivion or they
attempt to stay aware. Wallace demands awareness but he also diagnoses that the sincere
people who try to stay aware, often suffer in their struggle to resist oblivion. I argue that
Wallace shows us that this struggle does not need to be our main source of suffering. It will
become clear that he diagnoses an ironic line of ascent which makes us suffer in this
struggle. Instead, Wallace wants us to confront the multiplicity of this struggle. This struggle
between oblivion and awareness is also reflected in the main protagonist of “Mister
Squishy”, Terry Schmidt. Furthermore, I also provide an elaborate summary of this story,
which is necessary for the second part of this chapter. In this second part, I discuss how
Wallace’s clinical diagnosis is evoked within the reader through the style and technique of
the story. I will approach “Mister Squishy” as a literary machine and show how it functions.
The reader therefore has to work with this text to find out which effects it is capable of
producing. By doing so, he or she will be able to experience Wallace’s diagnosis in “Mister
Squishy” in order to become aware of new possibilities for life.
44
5.1. Clinical Oblivion: The Struggle between Awareness and
Forgetfulness
As a clinician of society, Wallace argued that ‘fiction’s about what it is to be a fucking human
being’ (McCaffery 2012, 26). Moreover, he wanted to provide a symptomatology of our
suffering so that we could move beyond it. In Oblivion, Wallace diagnoses that a central
struggle of our contemporary lives, is a conflict between the attempt to stay aware and the
temptation to be oblivious. He argued that the type of fiction that does not represent this
struggle
doesn’t feel true at all. I read it as a relief from what’s true. I read it as a relief from
that fact that, I received five hundred thousand discrete bits of information today, of
which maybe twenty-five are important (Lipsky 2010, 38)
Wallace wanted to represent what it feels like to be alive, ‘I’ve always thought of myself as a
realist’ (Miller 2012, 60).30 As already discussed, Wallace wanted literature to go beyond
irony in order to portray authentic and sincere experiences. According to Wallace, it is an
authentic and human experience to struggle if you want to stay aware. However, he
diagnoses that we often suffer because we are oblivious to the fact that this struggle is
actually an authentic experience that is true to life. While he wants people to stay aware, he
also shows us that oblivion will always make us struggle.
The title of this story collection therefore refers to a concept that is central in all of Wallace’s
writing. For example, Josh Roiland discusses the concept of oblivion with regard to Wallace’s
literary journalism.31 In this essay, Roiland connects Wallace’s nonfiction with Friedrich
30
In an interview about Oblivion, Wallace said: ‘I don’t know very many writers who don’t think of themselves as
realists, in terms of trying to convey the way stuff tastes and feels to you. I mean, a lot of stuff that’s capital-R
Realism just seems to me somewhat hokey, because obviously realism is an illusion of realism, and the idea that
small banal details are somehow more real or authentic than larger strange details has always seemed to me to
be just a little bit crude (…) You just try to do stuff that seems alive to you’ (Paulson 2012, 129-130)
31
‘Getting Away From It All: The Literary Journalism of David Foster Wallace and Nietzsche’s Concept of Oblivion’
(2012).
45
Nietzsche’s discussion of oblivion. In The Genealogy of Morals, Friedrich Nietzsche describes
‘the faculty of oblivion’ as
an active screening device, (…). The role of this active oblivion is that of a concierge:
to shut temporarily the doors and windows of consciousness; to protect us from the
noise and agitation (…); to introduce a little quiet into our consciousness (Nietzsche
2005, 79)
Nietzsche evaluates oblivion as something good for human beings: ‘with the smallest as with
the greatest happiness, however, there is always one thing which makes it happiness: being
able to forget’ (1980, 9). Nietzsche argues that oblivion is valuable for human beings because
it strengthens our ability to act, since ‘all acting requires forgetting’ (1980, 10). Without
oblivion, the past and the present would numb us. Instead, oblivion is the concierge of our
consciousness, it ‘maintains order and etiquette in the household of the psyche’ (Nietzsche
2005, 79-80).
Josh Roiland argues that Wallace ‘suffered from an absence of oblivion’ (2012, 28). Wallace
does not seem to be protected against all the noise surrounding him. His writing style is
characterized by a chaos of details, impressions and endless digressions. Contrary to
Nietzsche, Wallace regards oblivion as something negative. Wallace regards it as a tool to
escape reality and our responsibilities. For example, in his essay “A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll
Never Do Again”, Wallace observes how tourists on a luxury cruise ‘have allowed oblivion to
close the door on their consciousness, and in exchange they are happy – but Wallace
believes it is a false consciousness’ (Roiland 2012, 31).32 Wallace diagnoses this behavior
because ‘to be oblivious to the attendant concerns and responsibilities of daily life, (…) is
something Wallace is both unwilling and unable to do’ (Roiland 2012, 29).
32
Wallace does acknowledge that oblivion can be useful, ‘he is fascinated by the fact that top athletes bypass
their head and simply act’ (Roiland 2005, 33). For example, in “Tennis Player Michael Joyce’s Professional Artistry
as a Paradigm of Certain Stuff about Choice, Freedom, Discipline, Joy, Grotesquerie, and Human Completeness”,
he admires tennis player Michael Joyce and his ‘evident ability to shut down lines of thinking that aren’t to his
advantage’ (Wallace 1998, 222). However, ‘while oblivion helps athletes perform, Wallace also believes its
prevents them from offering any meaningful insight into their own achievements’ (Roiland 2005, 33).
46
Instead, Wallace demands that we try to stay aware. This imperative to stay aware resonates
in all of Wallace’s writing: ‘the difference is awareness (this is always the difference in
Wallace)’ (Smith 2011, 263). For Wallace, the essence of being a human being, is to be aware
and conscious and to ask yourself questions: ‘I think what it depends upon is a willingness to
pay a certain kind of attention’ (Goldfarb 2012, 141).33 Wallace’s demand to stay aware is
also central in his Kenyon College commencement speech “This is Water”. In this speech,
Wallace argues that
the really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and
discipline, and effort, (…) The alternative is unconsciousness, the default setting, the
“rat race”- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing
(Wallace 2005)
Wallace demands that we stay aware but he also recognizes that this attempt to stay aware
will always be a struggle. To stay aware is the struggle we live in, ‘we have to keep reminding
ourselves, over and over: “This is water, this is water”’ (Wallace 2005). Wallace diagnoses
that sincere human beings who want to stay aware, often suffer and struggle from their
attempt to stay aware.
In all of Wallace’s writing, we encounter characters who show us how ‘too much awareness
– particularly self-awareness has allowed us to be less responsible than ever’ (Smith 2011,
268). For example, in “Good Old Neon”, Neal attempts to be highly aware of everything all
the time but it makes him act as an extreme fraud. Most of the characters in Oblivion try to
be aware, ‘they seem able to see everything but what’s in front of their eyes and to talk
about everything but what actually matters to them’ (Max 2012, 277). While they are shown
to be sincere human beings with the intention to stay aware, their actual behavior
33
In his demand for awareness, Wallace’s shares similar concerns with existentialist philosophers, such as
Friedrich Nietzsche, who ‘asserted the necessity of making one’s life as fully conscious as possible, whatever
limitations one might inevitably encounter’ (Hall 2006, 67). With Nietzsche began ‘the assumption that posttraditional post-modern human beings have the historically unparalleled potential to “create themselves” if they
simply have the will to do so’ (Hall 2006, 71). In our postmodern era, a widespread realization of our potential
seems to have numbed us. Wallace argues how people become oblivious to escape their responsibilities. While
Nietzsche argued that oblivion was good for us, Wallace therefore diagnosed how a postmodern freedom has
led people into oblivion for the wrong reasons. Oblivion has become part of the illness and it needs to be
resisted with awareness.
47
contradicts their good intentions. Moreover, their awareness makes them struggle. Wallace
diagnoses how our suffering is caused by the attempt to be almost completely aware or
completely sincere and authentic. They are shown to be sincere human beings with good
intentions because they want to avoid the escape from reality into an unconsciousness of
oblivion. But Wallace shows how his characters constantly struggle in their attempt to stay
aware and that most of their suffering is caused by this struggle.
Wallace therefore demands us to become aware of this struggle. If we are sincere human
beings who want to stay aware, we should also confront the fact that to stay aware is a
constant struggle. Wallace diagnoses how we suffer because we still believe we might be
relieved from the struggle. We set a certain goal or standard to reach, complete awareness
or sincerity, but Wallace shows us that we deny the true forces of life. For example, Neal is
someone who sets the goal to be completely authentic but he suffers from his struggle to
achieve it. Wallace wants us to become aware that this struggle is what makes us human
and authentic. The struggle is part of the forces of life and we should become aware that life
will always be a multiplicity of differences. We will always be both aware and oblivious,
sincere and fraudulent. For Wallace, this is
the really central Kafka joke — that the horrific struggle to establish a human self
results in a self whose humanity is inseparable from that horrific struggle. That our
endless and impossible journey toward home is in fact our home (Wallace 1998b, 26)
For Wallace, this struggle is true to the forces of life. It is real, it is what makes us human. In
Oblivion, Wallace shows us characters who are constantly on a certain ‘journey towards
home’ but he shows that they suffer because they cannot acknowledge that they are already
home. Wallace presents a diagnosis of our suffering and he gives his readers the opportunity
to become aware of it. He shows us characters who refuse to become aware of the fact that
they are suffering because they want to escape an authentic struggle that is true to life. They
want to escape the forces of life and find some ironic point of view that can relieve them
from this struggle.
48
In Oblivion, Wallace wants to make his readers aware of what they have become oblivious
to. He shows us characters who seem to be aware of almost everything but they fail to
become aware of the authenticity of their struggles. They cannot accept that to be human
implies that you will struggle. Instead, they follow an ironic line of ascent thinking this will
offer them a relief from the multiplicity of life. In his writing, Wallace wants to wake his
readers up to this clinical diagnosis with the goal to cure our suffering. In “Mister Squishy”, I
will show how the reader is able to become aware of his diagnosis through Wallace’s style
and technique. While in “Good Old Neon”, Wallace unfolds his diagnosis for the reader, I
argue that in “Mister Squishy”, the reader experiences Wallace’s diagnosis. He or she is
thrown into a struggle to stay aware amidst a chaos of data, complex vocabulary, recursive
sentences and open-ended plotlines. First, I will offer a summary of “Mister Squishy” and
discuss how Wallace represents his clinical diagnosis in the main character of the story, Terry
Schmidt.
5.2. “Mister Squishy” 34
“Mister Squishy” starts off in medias res: ‘The Focus Group was then reconvened in another
of Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Advertising’s nineteenth-floor conference rooms’ (Wallace
2005, 3). The reader is dropped right into the action but the event appears to be rather
tedious. We observe a Focus Group that is part of a market research experiment organized
by Reesemeyer Shannon Belt (RSB), an advertising agency. RSB was assigned by the famous
“Mister Squishy” brand to test Squishy’s new snack cake, ‘Felony!’.35 The icon of the widely
known “Mister Squishy” brand
34
I argue that this elaborate summary is necessary to portray at least a fraction of what the experience of
reading “Mister Squishy” is like.
35
‘The dark and exceptionally dense and moist-looking snack cakes inside the packaging were Felonies! – a risky
and multivalent trade name meant both to connote and to parody the modern health-conscious consumer’s
sense of vice/indulgence/transgression/sin vis à vis the consumption of a high-calorie corporate snack’ (5).
49
was a plump and childlike cartoon face of indeterminate ethnicity with its eyes
squeezed partly shut in an expression that somehow connoted delight, satiation, and
rapacious desire all at the same time (4)36
This new snack cake was being tested ‘for its appeal to the 19-39 Male demographic, the
single most prized and fictile demotarget in high-end marketing’ (6). The members of the
Focus Group eat samples of the snack cake while being given a presentation by the Focus
Group Facilitator, ‘Terry Schmidt and he was 34 years old, a Virgo’ (9). Terry is employed by
‘Team ∆y, a cutting-edge market research firm that Reesemeyer Shannon Belt Adv. had
begun using almost exclusively in recent years’ (3-4). These first pages of “Mister Squishy”
are filled with tedious and statistical information about the chocolate snack cake 37 and
observations of the Focus Group38.
Gradually, we learn more about the Focus Group Facilitator, Terry Schmidt.39 The focus of
the story widens as we learn that Terry Schmidt is giving his presentation ‘in a lively and
spontaneous way while actually remaining inwardly detached and almost clinically
observant’ (9). The statistical and scientific observations could therefore be Terry’s own
observations.40 Terry’s work clearly influences him because the reader is confronted with
numerous statistical observations about the Focus Group.41 We learn more about the Focus
Group and about Terry Schmidt’s life. 42 Suddenly however, the perspective shifts to a new
storyline.
36
The cartoon face ‘had become one of the most popular, recognizable, and demonstrably successful brand
icons in American advertising’ (5)
37
‘A domed cylinder of flourless maltilol-flavored sponge cake covered entirely in 2.4mm of a high-lecithin
chocolate frosting manufactured with trace amounts of butter, cocoa butter, baker’s chocolate, chocolate
liquor, vanilla extract, dextrose, and sorbitol, (…)’ (6)
38
‘Less than 50% of the room’s total footwear involved laces’ (10)
39
Who ‘lived alone in a condominium he had recently financed’ (9)
40
Terry Schmidt ‘held degrees in both Descriptive Statistics and Behavorial Psychology’ (3)
41
For example, we learn that one of the Focus Group Members has a nametag with “Norberto” on it, ‘making
this the first Norberto to appear in any of the over 845 Focus Groups that Schmidt had led so far in his career as
a Statistical Field Researcher for Team ∆y’ (11)
42
We are told that ‘Schmidt kept his own private records of correlations between product, Client agency, and
certain variables in Focus Groups’ constituents and procedures’ (11). This probably explains why we get
observations such as: ‘There was one obvious hairweave in the room, as well as two victims of untreated Male
Pattern Baldness’ (12)
50
The figure that began its free climb up the building’s steadily increscent north face just
before 11: 00 AM was outfitted in tight windproof Lycra leggings (…)’ (13).43 In a new
paragraph, someone suddenly appears to be climbing the RSB’s building while ‘a small crowd
of passersby began to gather on the sidewalk below’ (13). The climber reaches the fifth floor
until suddenly we return to the conference room. Not for long however, because on page
fourteen a new element invades the story: ‘I was one of the men in this room, the only one
wearing a wristwatch who never glanced at it. What looked like glasses were not’ (14).
Apparently, this first-person character is infiltrating the focus group as some sort of spy: ‘I
was wired from stem to stem. A small LCD at the bottom of my right scope ran both Real
Time and Mission Time’ (14). He seems to be on some sort of mission but the reader is not
allowed to know more about this character because after only a few sentences, we return to
the conference room.
After these two sudden perspective shifts, the story gradually focuses more on Schmidt’s
personal life. For example, we learn that he is sexually attracted to one of his colleagues,
Darlene Lilley, who is also giving a presentation to another Focus Group at the same
moment.44 The reader gets to know Terry Schmidt and finds out that he is a lonely, sad and
desperate individual. In between, we are constantly given more information about the
market research business.45 Suddenly, a new paragraph about the climber returns, which will
happen for quite a few more times throughout the story. We are told that ‘the exterior
figure wore also a mountaineer’s tool apron and a large nylon or microfiber backpack.
Visually, he was both conspicuous and complex’ (19). He keeps on climbing while more and
more people gather down below. After only one page, we return to the conference room
where ‘Schmidt was simply giving the Focus Group a little extra background’ (20). We also
learn that after the presentation, Schmidt will leave the Focus Group alone so that they can
43
‘(…) and a snug hooded GoreTex sweatshirt w/fiber-lined hood up and tied tight and what appeared to be
mountaineering or rock-climbing boots except that instead of crampons or spikes there were suction cups lining
the instep of each boot’ (13)
44
‘(…) and Terry Schmidt was personally somewhat in awe of the self-possession and interpersonal savvy
Darlene had displayed (…), an awe tinged with an unwilled element of romantic attraction, and it is true that
Schmidt at night in his condominium (…) masturbated to thoughts of having moist slapping intercourse with
Darlene Lilley on one of the ponderous laminate conference tables’ (16)
45
‘The Focus Groups made little difference in the long run – the only true test was real sales, in Schmidt’s
personal opinion’ (17)
51
discuss ‘their experience and assessments of Felonies! as a group’ (21). They are told to
prepare ‘the hopefully univocal Group Response Data Summary packet’ (21).
Throughout the following pages, we learn more about the sad and depressing life of Terry
Schmidt. He seems to resemble Neal from “Good Old Neon” when he mentions that he has
‘the feeling that people he was just trying to talk as candidly as possible to always believed
he was making a sales pitch or trying to manipulate them in some way’ (25).46 Moreover, he
feels as if ‘the great grinding US marketing machine had somehow colored his whole being’
(25). In this passage, we read a small Neal-like monologue about how Terry wants to be
sincere but fears that he will be regarded as a fraudulent person.47 On pages 26 and 27, we
briefly return to the climber who is still climbing the RSB’s building. We learn that ‘the figure
averaged roughly 230 seconds per story’ (27). Afterwards, we return to Schmidt’s thoughts.
We discover that as a young man, he thought he could change the market business but he
soon learned that this was a mere illusion.48 He realizes his ‘smallness within a grinding
professional machine you can’t believe you once had the temerity to think you could help
change’ (31-32). Meanwhile, he was ‘simultaneously fascinated and repelled at the way in
which all these thoughts and feelings could be entertained in total subjective private while
Schmidt ran the Focus Group’ (31).
On page 34, another mysterious paragraph about the climber returns and we learn that he
was ‘at the base of the eight floor’ (34). Afterwards, we briefly jump back to Terry Schmidt
who tells us that ‘there were two basic ways a new product could position itself in a US
market’ (35).49 On page 37, we return to ‘the high-altitude figure gazing down at them’ (37).
46
We are also told that Terry ‘had had several years of psychotherapy and was not without some perspective on
himself’ (25)
47
For example, when he would be sincere about his feelings towards ‘a female colleague’ (Darlene Lilley), ‘he
would nevertheless in all probability be viewed as probably just wanting to sleep with her, or as maybe even
having a small creepy secretive kind of almost shrine to her in one corner of the unused second bedroom of his
condominium’ (26).
48
At first, he believed he was ‘fundamentally different from the common run of man, unique and in certain ways
superior, more as it were central, meaningful’ (30)
49
We are told that Felony! is a Shadow snack or an Antitrend: ‘A Shadow snack simply worked to define itself in
opposition to the overall trend against HDL fats, refined carbs, transfatty acids, i.e. against (…) the demographic
heading Healthy Lifestyles’ (35). These Antitrends ‘rode the transverse Shadow, that said or sought to say to a
consumer bludgeoned by herd-pressures (…) that hey, you deserve it, reward yourself, brands that in essence
52
In this passage, the climber becomes more mysterious and even threatening. The climber
seems to grab a mask or a balloon but nobody can figure out what the purpose of his climb
is.50 He remains a mystery and the crowd speculates if the climber is part of ‘a PR stunt (…)
or whether perhaps the climbing figure was one of those renegade urban daredevils’ (39).
The climber becomes even more terrifying when we learn that he is carrying a ‘real or
imitation semiautomatic weapon’ (40). Moreover, he appeared ‘to have removed some sort
of radio, cellular phone, or handheld recording device from his mountaineer’s apron and to
be speaking into it’ (41). The crowd speculates that it could ‘be some sort of licensed
prearranged corporate promotion or stunt or ploy’ (41). Others fear that he might be a
terrorist.51
On page 42, we return to Terry Schmidt and the mechanisms (or manipulations) of the
market research business. We learn that Schmidt has almost no chance at promotion and
that the research he is doing for Team ∆y, is close to being pointless.52 The story becomes
more pessimistic and ‘the almost-34-year old Terry Schmidt had very nearly nothing left
anymore of the delusion that he differed from the great herd of the common run of men’
(47).53 Furthermore, the reader learns more about Terry Schmidt’s spare time, in which he
collected coins and sometimes ‘power-walked on a treadmill in a line of eighteen identical
treadmills’ (49). In the meantime, the presentation about the snack cake continues until
suddenly on page 51, a strange sentence intrudes the text. This sentence introduces a
paragraph that lasts until page 53. The transition from a sentence that tells us more about
Terry Schmidt’s condominium, is very sudden and strange:
said what’s the use of living longer and healthier if there aren’t those few precious moments in every day when
you stopped, sat down, and took a few moments of hard-earned pleasure just for you?’ (36)
50
He ‘wore what appeared to be a deflated cranial mask or balloon, dorsal airtank, and frankly demonic-looking
tail’ (38)
51
There was ‘counterspeculation in the crowd that the whole thing was maybe designed to maybe only look like
a media stunt (…) that the idea was for him to look as eccentric as possible (…) and then to spray automatic fire
indiscriminately down into the crowd’ (42)
52
‘Team ∆y’s real function was to present Reesemeyer Shannon Belt test data that R.S.B. could then turn around
and present to Client as confirming the soundness of the very OCC’ (44) (OCC is explained in a footnote as
meaning ‘Overall Campaign Concept’ (44)
53
A small depressing side-story is being told when we learn that Terry ‘volunteered to act as Big Brother for a
boy age 11-15 who lacked significant male mentors’ (48). When this boy and his friends asked Terry to drive
them to a shopping mall, they left him outside ‘waiting at the curb for over three hours without their returning’
(48).
53
(…) in the small utility room that was separated from Schmidt’s condominium’s
kitchen by a foldable door of louvered enamel composite. Ricin and its close relative
abrin are powerful phytotoxins, respectively derived from castor and jequirity beans,
whose attractive flowering plants can be purchased at most commercial nurseries
and require just three months of cultivation (51-52)54
The following sentences offer us more information about the production of ricin, until we
are finally told on page 53 that ‘Ricin requires 24-36 hours to produce initial symptoms of
severe nausea, vomiting, disorientation, and cyanosis. Terminal VF and circulatory collapse
follow within twelve hours’ (53). It appears that Ricin is a lethal poison but the reader is left
clueless about this sudden new element in the story. Immediately after this confusing
passage, the perspective shifts back to the climber. We discover that he starts to inflate
himself:
First the bottom and belly and thighs ballooned (…), one shoulder’s valve inflated the
left arm, the other the right arm, & c., until the figure’s entire costume had become
large, bulbous, and doughily cartoonish (53)
Meanwhile, the crowd remains clueless until the figure resolved ‘into something that
produced from 400+ ground-level US adults loud cries of recognition and an almost childlike
delight’ (53). After this sentence, we are immediately back into the conference room.55 In
these last few pages, the story became a strange collection of sudden sentences and
paragraphs that are difficult to grasp for the reader.
After the mysterious inflation of the climber, we return to the Focus Group. It appears that
Terry is about to leave the Focus Group so that the members can compare their opinions
about the snack cake. Meanwhile, we read some more desperate fantasies of Terry about
Darlene Lilley.56 We are told that the presentation had so far taken 23 minutes until
suddenly the mysterious storyline about the Ricin returns. We discover that the Ricin can be
54
In the text, there were already small references to Ricin, but I will address these later on in the chapter. I did
not mention them before, as they are easily missed and forgotten while reading “Mister Squishy”.
55
‘… And that the time, Schmidt told the Focus Group (…)’ (53)
56
‘In some of the fantasies in which he and Darlene Lilley were having high-impact intercourse on the firms’
conference tables Schmidt kept finding himself saying Thank you, oh thank you in rhythm to the undulatory
thrusting motions of the coitus’ (53-54)
54
used to inject it into snack cake, ‘through the thin wrapper into the 26 x 13 mm ellipse of
fondant at the Felony!’s hollow center (…) and hope that the subject got all or most of the
snack cake down’ (57). It appears that someone wants to inject poison into the snack cake to
kill someone.57 During a first read, this storyline remains rather vague for the reader.
However, throughout the story there were already small hints suggesting that it is Terry
Schmidt who plans on injecting the poison.58 The threatening tension of terror therefore
keeps on rising in the story. On page 57, a footnote suddenly marks the return of the Icharacter or the spy in the Focus Group. It appears that his mission is to suddenly start
vomiting because he has smalls bags of fake vomit taped under his sweater. He is clearly on
a mission but for the reader it all remains vague, mysterious and threatening.59
The last pages of the story shift perspective again. After the paragraph about the ricin and
botulinus, the reader is introduced to A. Roland Mounce, a colleague of Terry Schmidt.
Mounce is the personal mentee of Robert Awad, ‘the Team ∆y Senior Research Director’
(22). In these last few pages we are offered clues about the true purpose of the Focus Group.
Robert Awad tells Mounce that the Focus Group is actually part of a
larger field experiment that (…) Team ∆y’s upper management’s secret inner
executive circle (…) is conducting for its own sub rosa research into TFGs’ probable
role in the ever more complex and self-conscious marketing strategies of the future
(59)
The Focus Group is actually part of a larger experiment for a ‘fairly bold and unconventional
ad concept’ 61).60 However,
57
However, the following paragraphs argue that ‘botulinus’ might actually be ‘more practical’ (58)
We were already told that he ‘worked in the small home laboratory he’d established in his condominium’s
utility room’ (49)
59
He tells us: ‘we were all of us anxious to get down to business already’ (57). The reader nevertheless remains
clueless about who this ‘we’ signifies.
60
This new ad concept would actually create ‘a Narrative (or, ‘Story’) Campaign and the concept of making some
new product’s actual marketers’ strategies and travails themselves a part of that product’s essential Story’ (60).
For example, they would leak the news that the new snack cake was ‘a disastrously costly and labor-intensive
ultra-gourmet snack cake which had to be marketed by beleaguered legions of nerdy admen under the thumb
of, say, a tyrannical mullah-like CEO who was such a personal fiend for luxury-class chocolate that he was
determined to push Felonies! into the US market’ (60-61).
58
55
‘in point of fact none of what Robert Awad had brought his mentee four miles out
onto the lake to whisper in Mounce’s big pink ear was true or even in any sense real’
(61)
Instead, what Awad thought about the true purpose of the Focus Group, was actually what
Alan Britton, the chief of Team ∆y, made Awad belief. The perspective then shifts to a
conversation between Alan Britton and Scott R. Laleman, another colleague of Schmidt. 61
Britton tells Laleman ‘over near-zeppelin-sized cigars in his inner office’ that
The ultimate objective was to eliminate all unnecessary random variables in those
Field tests, (…) this meant doing away as much as possible with the human element,
the most obvious of these elements being the TFG facilitators (62).
Alan Britton actually wanted to collect ‘some hard study data showing unequivocally that
human facilitators made a difference’ (64). He wanted that ‘Team ∆y would become 100%
tech-driven, abstract, its own Captured show’ (64). To collect this data, he wants to
orchestrate a sabotage to see ‘how the facilitators reacted to unplanned stimuli, how they
responded to their Focus Groups’ own reactions’ (65).62 Furthermore, Britton assigns this
task to Scott Laleman as ‘a chance for ∆y’s golden boy to strut his stuff. Impress the boss’
(66). The story ends with Britton pointing at Laleman ‘as if to signal “You’re On the Air”,
while ‘Laleman sat there smiling at it, his mind a great flat blank white screen’ (66).
“Mister Squishy” is clearly a difficult story that evolves into a complex intertwining of
storylines. The reader learns more about Terry Schmidt while gradually, strange elements
intrude the text. Reading “Mister Squishy” is an unsettling and confusing experience.
Moreover, several storylines create a threatening suspension that builds up to a dramatic
61
These two colleagues that are mentioned in the story are younger and more successful colleagues of Schmidt,
who are described throughout the story as arrogant up-and-comers.
62
It is important to note that in these last six pages of the story, the entire storyline about the sabotage is
intertwined with several flashbacks and random observations. For example, ‘The mental image Scott Laleman
associated with Alan Britton was of an enormous macadamia nut with a tiny little face painted on it’ (62),
‘Sometimes, on the rare occasions when he masturbated, Laleman’s fantasy involved a view of himself, shirtless
and adorned with warpaint, standing with his boot on the chest of various supine men and howling upward at
what lay outside the fantasy’s frame but was probably the moon’ (64).
56
climax that ultimately never comes. The reader discovers that it might all be part of a plan to
sabotage Terry Schmidt, the Focus Group Facilitator but this sabotage never really happens.
5.3. Terry Schmidt’s Struggle
Terry Schmidt is the main protagonist of “Mister Squishy”. I argue that in this character,
Wallace shows us a struggle between oblivion and awareness. Moreover, it will become
clear that he suffers because he makes the same mistake as Neal in “Good Old Neon”. Terry
approaches life in an ironic ascent that ultimately leaves him disillusioned. In “Mister
Squishy”, it is obvious that Schmidt sets the goal to be completely aware of everything. He
observes the world in a similar statistical fashion because he is obsessed with finding
something that can truly make a difference in the noise of the postmodern ironic world
surrounding him. He processes all the details around him and collects everything in his
apartment. The story therefore features numerous statistical and tedious observations of
the conference room and the Focus Group Members. 63
The imperative to be aware controls Terry Schmidt’s life. He desperately tries to capture
everything in his resistance against oblivion. In his profession, his statistical obsession can be
useful. We are told that ‘Terry possessed also a natural eye for behavioral details that could
often reveal tiny gems of statistical relevance amid the rough raw surfeit of random fact.
Sometimes little things made a difference’ (9). Terry approaches everything in his life in the
same manner. He is obsessed with being aware because he beliefs that he will eventually
find something that can truly mean or be real in this postmodern ironic world. The story is
therefore filled with statistical observations because ‘the whole problem and project of
63
Bottled spring water and caffeinated beverages were made available to those who thought they might want
them’ (3), ‘There were more samples of the product arranged on a tray at the conference table’s center’ (3),
‘Precisely 50% of the room’s men wore coats and ties or had suitcoats or blazers hanging from the back of their
chairs, three of which coats were part of an actual three-piece business wardrobe; another three men wore
combinations of knit shirts, slacks, and various crew-and turtleneck sweaters classifiable as Business Casual’ (9)
57
descriptive statistics was discriminating between what made a difference and what did not’
(12).64
Schmidt takes on the challenge as a sincere human being to face the postmodern ironic
world of groundlessness. He sets the goal to be as aware as possible to find something
meaningful in the chaos, something that can make a difference. But it gradually becomes
clear how Schmidt loses faith in finding anything that will reward his awareness. Schmidt
clearly resembles Neal, his ‘grave sense of purposelessness is matched by the narrator in
“Good Old Neon”’ (Benzon 2004). For example, when Schmidt looks at the Focus Group
Members, he ‘had a quick vision of them all in the conference room as like icebergs and/or
floes, only the sharp caps showing, unknown and –knowable to one another’ (Wallace 2005,
31).
But Schmidt makes the same mistake as Neal from “Good Old Neon”, because he sets an
unreachable standard to life while being caught up in a postmodern ironic world. It becomes
clear that Schmidt approaches the world with an ironic movement of ascent that will
ultimately always disappoint him. He tries to be completely aware so that he might find
something that can make a difference, mean something, and will end his struggle. For
example, he desires a sincere and human relationship with a woman, preferably Darlene
Lilley, but it becomes clear how he sets a standard of complete sincerity. He imagined ‘that it
was probably only in marriage (…) that partners allowed each other to see below the berg’s
cap’s public mask and consented to be truly known’ (31). But Schmidt, similar to Neal, does
express a sense of the superior irony when he realizes that complete earnestness is almost
‘impossible except in the context of the mystery of true marriage’ (32). Schmidt expresses a
sense for the superior irony because he realizes that this mystery of true sincerity might
actually be impossible:
64
Another example: ‘Each of the Target Focus Group’s members wore a blue-and-white nametag with his first
name inscribed thereon by hand. 42.8% of these inscriptions were cursive or script; three of the remaining eight
were block capitals, with all the block-cap first names, in a remarkable but statistically meaningless coincidence,
beginning with H.’ (17)
58
Schmidt now lately felt he was coming to understand why the Church all through his
childhood catechism and pre-Con referred to it as the Holy Sacrament of Marriage,
for it seemed every bit as miraculous and trans-rational and remote from the
possibilities of actual lived life as the crucifixion and resurrection and
transubstantiation did (32-33).
Schmidt realizes that this standard is not true to the forces of life and therefore expresses a
sense for the superior irony. He knows that this desire to fix the forces of life is a viewpoint
that is actually cruel to life. He realizes that he might never achieve it but he cannot confront
the multiplicity of life. Instead, he displays the danger of the ironic ascent. Schmidt regarded
his desire for complete sincerity and awareness
not as a goal to expect ever to really reach or achieve but as a kind of navigational
star, as in the sky, something high and untouchable and miraculously beautiful in the
sort of distant way that reminded you always of how ordinary and unbeautiful and
incapable of miracles you your own self were (32-33)
This passage clearly reflects the danger of the ironic ascent. He sets an unreachable goal that
imposes a standard or a norm to the fluxes of life. Even though he expresses a sense for
superior irony, he still has a navigational star in the sky. He set the unreachable goal to be
completely aware because he believed he might ever find something that can truly be
different to the forces of life. Similar to Neal in “Good Old Neon”, Wallace shows us how a
postmodern irony will eventually only lead to a disillusioned loss of belief
(…) which was another reason why Schmidt had stopped looking at the sky or going
out at night or even usually ever opening the lightproof curtains of his
condominium’s picture window when he got home at night and instead sat with his
satellite TV’s channel-changer in his left hand switching rapidly from channel to
channel to channel out of fear that something better was going to come on suddenly
59
on another of the cable provider’s 220 regular and premium channels and that he
was about to miss it, spending three nightly hours this way (33)65
Schmidt’s ironic line of ascent depresses him and eventually makes him give up. He loses
faith in the possibility of anything meaningful, while he should realize that life is a
multiplicity of forces. His struggles were fixated on unreachable standards. He tried to be as
aware as possible because he truly believed that he could find something that would relieve
him from his struggle. But he is confronted with a postmodern ironic world that makes it
impossible to believe in anything. 66 Terry Schmidt gives up but instead of committing
suicide, he plans on injecting poison in the snack cake in a desperate attempt to somehow
bring the whole market research business down.
Wallace portrays a character who should have accepted that life is a multiplicity of forces.
Terry Schmidt suffers because he kept chasing a navigational star in his struggle between
oblivion and awareness, between sincerity and the impossibility of it. Wallace shows us how
his characters suffer because they are aware of everything instead of the fact that life will
always be a multiplicity of differences. They suffer because they think that their unreachable
standards will ultimately relieve them from their struggles. But this ironic line of ascent
alienates them from the true forces of life. This is why ‘from first to last, the book is a
somber portrait of souls in isolation’ (Boswell 2013). Wallace shows us that awareness can
65
The quote continues as: ‘(…) before it was time to stare with drumming heart at the telephone that wholly
unbeknownst to her had Darlene Lilley’s home number on Speed Dial so that it would take only one moment of
the courage to risk looking prurient or creepy to use just one finger to push just one gray button to invite her for
one cocktail or even just a soft drink over which he could take off his public mask and open his heart to her
before quailing and deferring the call one more night and waddling into the bathroom and/or then the creamand-tan bedroom to lay out the next day’s crisp shirt and tie and say his nightly dekate and then masturbate
himself to sleep again once more’ (33)
66
There is one instance that clearly reflects how postmodern irony has pervaded our culture and behavior. This
can be found in the reaction of the crowd observing the climber: ‘A couple young men in the crowd cried up at
the eight floor for the figure to jump, but their tone was self-ironic and it was plain that they were simply
parodying the typical cry of jaded onlookers to a figure balanced on a slim ledge 240 feet up in a high wind and
looking down at a crowd on the plaza’s sidewalk far below. Still, one or two much older people shot optical
daggers at the youths who’d shouted; it was unclear whether they knew what self-parody even was’ (34). This
reflects how postmodern irony has pervaded our society. The younger generation yells “Jump”, but everybody
should know it is irony and that they don’t really mean what they say. This also shows the emptiness of
postmodern irony, because it results in a loss of earnestness and sincerity.
60
be affirmative towards life if we become aware of the fact that life is a multiplicity of forces.
These characters are obsessed with awareness but Wallace shows us that they need to
become aware that their struggle towards home is their home. They need to become aware
that there is no ultimate ‘being’ or star waiting but that the real is always a becoming. It is
always a struggle. Instead, Schmidt and Neal constantly struggle to stay aware in the hope of
reaching their navigational star.
It is Wallace’s diagnosis of this struggle that the reader experiences while reading “Mister
Squishy”. He or she is thrown in a postmodern ironic world of chaos where nothing seems to
make sense. The reader tries to stay aware in the hope of reaching a navigational star, but
the experience of reading “Mister Squishy” becomes a source of suffering. It will become
clear how reading “Mister Squishy” is a source of suffering when the reader tries to fix and
structure the forces of multiplicity in “Mister Squishy”. Moreover, similar to “Good Old
Neon”, Wallace shows this multiplicity in the metafictional layer of the story. I will argue
how the metafictional layer of “Mister Squishy” is more effectual in evoking new possibilities
for life than “Good Old Neon”. While in “Good Old Neon”, these possibilities are mostly
shown to the reader, “Mister Squishy” truly gives the the opportunity to confront their
struggles in a new way . “Mister Squishy” wants us to avoid an ironic ascent and confront life
and literature in all its multiplicities. I will discuss how Wallace succeeds in making the
reader aware of his clinical diagnosis and new possibilities for life, through the style and
technique of “Mister Squishy”.
61
5.4. Critical Oblivion: ‘All they needed were the stressors.
Nested, high-impact stimuli’ (Wallace 2005, 65)
In the last part of my dissertation, I aim to complete the picture of Wallace’s writing as a
clinical and critical project. I will show how Wallace is able to evoke vitalistic lines of flight
and possibilities for life in his style and technique. I will discuss “Mister Squishy” as a literary
machine capable of producing vitalistic effects. Wallace obliges the reader to work with this
machine and experiment with it. Because he or she experiments with it, the reader will also
experience what this machine is capable of producing. In “Mister Squishy”, the reader is
thrown into a struggle to stay aware amidst an overload of statistical and complex data,
endless digressions and open-ended plotlines. Wallace makes his language stutter and
stammer, an operation that constantly unsettles the reader.
Minor literature unsettles because it is ‘the expression and creation of what is not yet, not
present or other than the actual’ (Colebrook 2003, 99). This confrontation with something
that is not yet, a becoming, also creates room for becoming within the reader. “Mister
Squishy” is a multiplicity that evokes an authentic experience while also pointing out new
possibilities for life. I argue that Wallace points out vitalistic lines of flight in the
metafictional layer of this story. By doing so, Wallace succeeds in his aim to go beyond irony
by writing with a bothness that comprises both irony or metafiction and sincerity. The
unsettling reading experience invites the reader to reconsider his or her own life. From a
Deleuzian perspective, in other words, “Mister Squishy” produces ‘new ways of saying and
seeing’ (Colebrook 2003, 150).
62
5.4.1. The Reader: ‘It’s supposed to be uneasy’ (McCaffery 2012, 33).
My reading counters the general disappointed feeling of readers and critics with regard to
Oblivion. For instance, in his posthumous biography of Wallace, D.T. Max observes that for
most critics the collection did not pull off the new direction Wallace had announced:
‘Wallace had promised readers something different; a single-entendre writing that felt
redemptive. That hardly seemed the achievement, let alone the aim of Oblivion’ (2012, 279).
Similarly, Marshall Boswell argues that Wallace’s vitalistic attempt to provide new
possibilities of life ‘gives way, in Oblivion, to dense description without redemption’ (2013).
These stories deal with disillusioned and depressed characters written in a complex, dense
style. Especially “Mister Squishy” is a hard read, with ‘thick layers of verbiage, perspective
shifts, and (…) disorienting chronological jumps’ (Max 2012, 277). It is quite normal that for
most readers, ‘there are times when reading Wallace feels unbearable, and the weight of
things stacked against the reader insurmountable’ (Smith 2011, 274). My Deleuzian
interpretation shows that Wallace’s work is more than ‘mere formal-stunt pilotry’ (Smith
2011, 279).
We must keep in mind that Wallace, as a vitalistic author and a clinician of society, is always
concerned with the reader. He knows that he makes his readers suffer but he argues that
the reader walks away from real art heavier than she came to it. Fuller. All the
attention and engagement and work you need to get from the reader can’t be for
you benefit; it’s got to be for hers (McCaffery 2012, 50)
The reader of Wallace is a Deleuzian reader who has to experiment and work with the text in
order for it to work. This is why a story of Wallace often denies the reader ‘a conventional
ending, it doesn’t do so out of malice, it does it out of concern, to provide a deeper palliative
than realistic storytelling can, because (…) you have to work to get better’ (Max 2012, 215).
However, it seemed that for some readers and critics of Oblivion, ‘the trick-free prose, the
63
Pynchon-free plots, the insistence that the reader work for his or her satisfaction- was simply
too pitiless to carry a reader through a novel’ (Max 2012, 280).
The reader of “Mister Squishy” ‘suffers to read it, but suffering is part of the point’ (Smith
2011, 278). Even the reader who is able to enjoy stories that are formally difficult, will have
to struggle to stay aware throughout “Mister Squishy”. Every reader who wants to stay
aware, will notice how oblivion will affect his reading. As a clinical author, Wallace wanted
his readers to become aware of his diagnosis and he therefore insisted ‘that the story not be
so amusing that it re-create the disease he was diagnosing’ (Max 2012, 182-183). In “Mister
Squishy”, the reader is not offered the ironic viewpoint of a spectator judging life. Instead,
this story is a form of superior irony that plunges the reader into the authentic struggle
between his attempt to stay aware and the desire to become oblivious. The reader struggles
and suffers because
“serious” art, (…) is more apt to make you uncomfortable, or to force you to work
hard to access its pleasures, the same way that in real life true pleasure is usually a
by-product of hard work and discomfort (McCaffery 2012, 22)
“Mister Squishy” certainly succeeds in making the reader struggle to stay aware. According
to Wallace ‘it’s supposed to be uneasy’ because he rejected the way society had ‘figured out
ways to reward passive spectation’ (McCaffery 2012, 33). Wallace wanted us to realize that
it is only in the struggle that we will find something authentic and sincere. He wanted us to
become aware that we will never reach an ultimate comfortable home because he argued
how our journey towards home is our home. Before I can show how “Mister Squishy” is ‘an
artistic commitment to complication in the service of sincerity’ (Baskin 2009) I must first
show how it functions as a literary machine.
64
5.4.2. The Functioning of “Mister Squishy”
In “Mister Squishy”, there are several elements that make the reader struggle. In all of his
stories, Wallace makes the reader suffer by writing
sentences that are syntactically not incorrect but still a real bitch to read. Or
bludgeoning the reader with data. Or devoting a lot of energy to creating
expectations and then taking pleasure in disappointing them (McCaffery 2012, 25).
In “Mister Squishy”, the reader encounters all of these elements. The machine triggers
oblivion within the reader but this challenges the reader to stay aware. He or she has to
plow through an abundance of statistical data while trying to stay aware in a recursive
sentence that can go on for several pages. Furthermore, there are also threatening plotlines
that suddenly appear but ultimately never come to an end. All of these elements force the
reader to stay aware and work with the text.
Complex Data Overload
“Mister Squishy” is set in the advertising and market research business. The story features
the typical business jargon and a lot of statistical information. As mentioned, these are
probably Terry Schmidt’s statistical observations. For example, the reader encounters
numerous dull and tedious observations of the Focus Group Members:
There were four pairs of eyeglasses in the room (…) There were two mustaches and
one probable goatee (…) Five of the men were more than 10% overweight (…) Three
of the men had hair classifiable as brown, two gray or salt/pepper, another three
black (…) three could be called blond or fair-haired (10-11)
The reader has to process an overload of data in “Mister Squishy”.67 Moreover, this
information is often conveyed in a difficult and complex style.68 For example, the snack cake
is described as ‘a domed cylinder of flourless maltilol-flavored sponge cake covered entirely
67
Similarly, “The Suffering Channel” is filled with ‘detailed background data on secondary characters, precise
descriptions of hotel rooms and pay-phone kiosks, and brand-name cataloging of clothes’ (Boswell 2013)
68
“Another Pioneer” probably contains the most difficult vocabulary of the collection. In this story, Wallace uses
words such as ‘semplacy’, ‘canescent’, ‘thanatophilic’,’entelechy’, ‘ptotic’, ‘trypanosomic’and ‘extrorse’.
65
in 2.4mm of a high-lecithin chocolate frosting’ (6). “Mister Squishy” also contains numerous
abbreviations:
Down the hall and past the MROP* Division’s green room, in another R.S.B.
conference room whose window faced NE, Darlene Lilley was leading twelve
consumers and two UAFs into the GRDS phase of Focused Response without any
structured QA or ersatz Full-Access background (15)69
The reader has to stay aware because some of these abbreviations can appear several pages
apart and he or she will most likely forget what they mean. Wallace also confronts the
reader with an overload of firm names:
Some of the other products and agencies whose branding campaigns Terry Schmidt
and Darlene Lilley’s Field Team had also worked on for Team ∆y were: Downyflake
Waffles for D’Arcy Masius Benton & Bowles, Diet Caffeine Free Coke for Ads
Infinitum US, Eucalyptamint for Pringle Dixon, Citizens Business Insurance for
Krauthammer-Jaynes/SMS, the G. Heileman Brewing Co.’s Special Export and Special
Export Lite for Bayer Bess Vanderwarker, Winner International’s HelpMe Personal
Sound Alarm for Reesemeyer Shannon Belt, Isotoner ComfortFit Gloves for PR Cogent
Partners, Northern Bathroom Tissue for Reesemeyer Shannon Belt, and RhônePoulenc Rorer’s new Nasacort AQ Prescription Nasap Spray, also for R.S.B (19)
These names will probably appear only once in the story. Their only function seems to be to
confront the reader with an overload of meaningless data. Furthermore, to explain how the
market research business works, Wallace often writes in a scientific or mathematical style:
(…) because Mister Squishy’s parent company had very strict normative ratios for
R&D marketing costs (=RDM) to production volume (=PV), ratios based on the CobbDouglas Function whereby
be 0 <
RDM(𝑥)
PV(𝑥)
RDM(𝑥)
PV(𝑥)
must, after all the pro forma hemming and hawing
<1, a textbook formulae which any first-term MBA student had to
memorize in Management Stats (45)
69
MROP is explained in the footnote as ‘*Market Research Oversight and Planning’ (15). R.S.B. is the company,
Reesemeyer Shannon Belt. NE is off course North-East. A UAF is the term for moles in the Focus Group who can
evaluate the facilitator: ‘Unintroduced Assistant Facilitators’ (7). The GRDS phase is the ‘Group Response Data
Summary’ (8), the phase that will take place after Schmidt’s presentation.
66
What makes it even more difficult, is that after (or in between) a long passage of dull and
scientific descriptions, important information might suddenly appear. For example, the
sudden intrusion of the storyline about the ricin and the botulinus carries on for three pages.
However, there are sudden clues that we are actually reading some sort of recipe to produce
a lethal poison:
Weigh the remainder of the filter’s contents and place them in a third sterile jar
along with x 4 their weight in fresh CH₃COCH₃. Repeat standing, filtering, and manual
squishing process 3-5 times. The residue at the procedures’ terminus will be nearly
pure ricin, of which 0.04 mg is lethal if injected directly (note that 9.5-12 times this
dose is required for lethality through ingestion). Saline or distilled water can be sued
to load a 0.4 mg ricin solution in a standard fine-gauge hypodermic injector, available
at better pharmacies everywhere under Diabetes Supplies (…) (52-53)
The reader is challenged to stay aware and he or she is rewarded with ‘important’
information.
Endless digressions
Wallace’s writing style also features endless digressions, often written in recursive
sentences. Wallace’s sentences can last for several pages and they challenge the reader to
stay aware.70 Moreover, these sentences are written in such a meandering flow that the
reader will most likely forget how they started. For example, there is a remarkable sentence
from page 28 to 31.71 This sentence starts out with Terry’s thoughts about the market
research business but gradually displays Terry’s depressed and disillusioned personality. It
takes us along a variety of subjects and feelings. When important information is embedded
in such a sentence, it will most likely be forgotten by the reader. For example, near the end
of the sentence, Terry Schmidt is telling the Focus Group that you only need certain doses of
70
I must note that “Another Pioneer” does take the crown on this part because it features a single paragraph of
23 pages long.
71
I have added this sentence as an appendix to this dissertation
67
‘KCN, As₂O₃, ricin C₂₁H₂₂O₂N₂, acincetilcholine, botulinus or even merely Tl or some other
aqueous base-metal compound to bring almost an entire industry down on one supplicatory
knee’ (30).
It is important to note that Wallace’s trademark, his footnotes, is mostly missing from this
collection.72 In fact, only “Mister Squishy” has a few footnotes, with the most important one
a note in which the I-character or spy returns for the second time. Most of the other
footnotes explain the abbreviations.73 However, this does not mean that Wallace is holding
out on the digressive quality of his writing. Instead, it seems that all the information is in the
text and embedded in his sentences. For example, he often uses ( ) or [ ].74
These digressions serve the purpose of making the language stutter. ‘Digression’ is one of
the eleven characteristics of Deleuze’s concept of style as stuttering. Digression makes
language stutter because ‘language is pushed to its limit in that sentence’ (Lecercle 2002,
243). We learn to digest information through separate sentences. But in Wallace’s fiction,
we have to process an abundance of information in endless digressions. The amount of
information we can process in one sentence seems to be pushed to its boundaries until it
becomes a multiplicity. Moreover, Wallace’s digressions are related to his clinical diagnosis
and vitalism. To make your language stutter through digression is to work ‘against the
determinacy and fixity, the teleology of meaning’ (Lecercle 2002, 243). Wallace wants us to
be able to confront the multiplicity of life and it is reflected in the digressive quality of his
style. When an author makes his language stutter through digressions, he ‘suggests the
72
‘I don’t think any of the stories have footnotes, which I’m rather proud of. Got that monkey off my back. I
think one story maybe has a couple of asterisk footnotes. You know, there are so few of them that you can use
asterisks’ (Crain 2012, 126)
73
It is interesting to note that the last page also contains a footnote: ‘Britton knew all about Laleman trying to
jew him out to A.C. Romney-Jaswat; who did the smug puppy think he was dealing with; Alan S. Britton had been
contending and surviving when this kid was still playing with his little pink toes’ (66)
74
‘(Hostess’s lead agency Chiat/Day I.B.’s 1991-2 double-blind Behavior series’ videotapes recorder
over 45% of younger consumers actually peeling off Ho Hos’ matte icing in great dry jagged flakes and
eating it solo, leaving the low-end cake itself to sit ossifying on their tables’ Lazy Susans, film clips of
which had reportedly been part of R.S.B.’s initial pitch to Mister Squishy’s parent company’s Subsidiary
Product Development boys.)’ (6-7)
68
possibility that the quilting point will never be reached and the meaning never be achieved’
(Lecercle 2002, 243). Wallace’s clinical diagnosis therefore resonates in his digressive
sentences. Moreover, the vitalistic effect of digressions is even stronger with regard to the
open-ended plotlines of “Mister Squishy”.
Open-ended plotlines
The last element of “Mister Squishy” that challenges the reader to stay aware, is Wallace’s
use of open-ended storylines. The story’s initial focus is on the conference room where Terry
Schmidt is giving a presentation to the Focus Group Members. Gradually, more and more
storylines appear. We are introduced to a climber who is climbing the R.S.B.’s building.
Furthermore, there is an ‘I-character’ who appears to be some kind of spy in the Focus
Group. We also learn that Terry Schmidt plans to poison the snack cake. Near the end of the
story, we are introduced to those higher up in the hierarchy of Team ∆y. It appears that all
these different elements are part of a sabotage plan that ultimately never comes to fruition.
“Mister Squishy” is a threatening story with different layers of storylines.
These storylines also suddenly invade the text. This unsettles the reader because mysterious
sentences and sudden perspective shifts come out of nowhere. Moreover, the reader can
only really grasp them in the last few pages. For example, the perspective shift to the
climber is always a sudden transition in a new paragraph.75 The ‘I-character’ only appears
once in the real text and his intrusion is even more sudden and unsettling:
The men’s demoprofiles and initial Systat scores were in Schmidt’s valise on the
carpet next to the whiteboard; he also had an over-shoulder bag he kept in his
cubicle. I was one of the men in this room, the only one wearing a wristwatch who
never once glanced at it (14).
75
These climber-paragraphs appear six times: 13, 19-20, 26-28, 34-35, 37-42, 53.
69
After only a few sentences, the perspective shifts back to Terry Schmidt. The ‘I-character’
only returns once more, in a footnote to a sentence with which it has no connection at all.76
In this footnote, we are told that he had ‘a small polyurethane bag taped under one arm’
with a tube ‘to emerge from the turtleneck through a small hole just under my chin’ (57). We
learn that he can fake vomit when he wants with a button on his watch. He is on a mission
but we never return to this character.
The storyline about the poison gradually develops throughout “Mister Squishy”. There are
already small clues throughout the story but the reader will probably remain oblivious to
them. For example, we are told that Schmidt had worked in labs before and that he even has
a laboratory in his home. On page 49, a sentence about ricin and botulinus suddenly intrudes
the text.77 The previous sentence tells us that Schmidt’s colleagues still have trouble recalling
his name
and always greeted him with an exaggerated bonhomie designed to obscure this fact.
Ricin and botulinus were about equally easy to cultivate. Actually they were both
quite easy indeed, assuming you were comfortable in a laboratory environment and
exercised due care in your procedures. Schmidt himself had personally overheard
some of the other young men in Technical Processing refer to Darlene Lilley as (…)
(49-50)
This shows how a sudden sentence appears and remains mysterious until we are told more
about ricin and botulinus near the end of page 51. In this next passage about ricin, the
reader has to read a lengthy paragraph about the production of ricin. Near the end of this
paragraph, it is mentioned that ricin is a lethal poison but the text immediately shifts to the
perspective of the climber. The storyline about the poison returns once more (56-58). In this
passage, we are told that the poison will be injected in the snack cake but the passage
76
‘(As with all Mister Squishy products, Felonies! were engineered to be palpably moist and to react with salivary
ptyalin in such a way as to literally ‘melt in the mouth,’ qualities established in very early Field tests to be
associated with both freshness and a luxe, almost sensual indulgence.)
77
We were told already told, twelve lines earlier, that in his spare time, Schmidt ‘worked in the small home
laboratory he’d established in his condominium’s utility room’ (49)
70
contains no clues that Terry Schmidt wants to poison the cake.78 Only a reader who stays
very aware throughout his first reading, will be able to grasp this storyline.
The last storyline suggests that the purpose of the Focus Group is something entirely
different. First, Robert Awad reveals to A. Ronald Mounce the ‘true’ purpose behind the
Focus Group, arguing that it is part of a special ad concept. However, it appears that Alan
Britton has misled Robert Awad and that most of it ‘was part of the cover narrative that
Britton had fed to Bob Awad’ (62). It is eventually Alan Britton, the chief of Team ∆y, who
tells us what ‘the really true Field experiment’ was (61). It becomes clear that Britton wants
to get rid of the Focus Group Facilitators and that they only needed data to show that the
facilitators made a difference in the market research so that they could fire them. The plan
was to orchestrate some kind of sabotage:
To see, he said he meant, how the facilitators reacted to unplanned stimuli, how they
responded to their Focus Groups’ own reactions. All they needed were the stressors.
Nested, high-impact stimuli. Shake them up. Rattle the cage, he said, watch what fell
out. This was all really what was known in the game as Giving Someone Enough Rope
(65)
It is therefore suggested that the climber and the spy were stimuli to distress Terry Schmidt.
However, nothing actually really happens. The suspension gets built up but the reader is
never relieved from it. The reader can only imagine how the orchestrated sabotage would
unfold.
78
This passage also suggests that Schmidt will probably use ‘the anaerobic saprophyte Clostridium botulinum’,
instead of the ricin (58).
71
5.4.3. The Effects of “Mister Squishy”: ‘A cascade of random noise’ (44)
The readers of “Mister Squishy” are forced to struggle through an overload of statistical and
seemingly meaningless data. The effect of the literary machine is that it forces the reader to
experience the struggle between awareness and oblivion. Wallace’s style demands
awareness from the reader because otherwise “Mister Squishy” would make no sense at all,
the entire story would fall into oblivion. The reader has to ‘piece together the story’s basic
narrative from the welter of marketing acronyms and concrete details’ (Boswell 2013).
“Mister Squishy” is a complex and painful read but ‘it does succeed in forcing the reader to
experience what is being depicted’ (Boswell 2013). Wallace’s style challenges the reader to
stay aware but at the same time, the literary machine will always trigger a sense of oblivion
within each reader. He or she is made to experience the authentic struggle to stay aware
amidst an overload of data. In order to make the reader experience this struggle, Wallace
seems very hostile towards the reader. He or she is left quite disillusioned near the end even
though Wallace always argued that ‘there has to be an accessible payoff for the reader if I
don’t want the reader to throw the book at the wall’ (McCaffery 2012, 33). In “Mister
Squishy”, this payoff seems even harder to find than in the other stories of Wallace. The
reader encounters a story that challenges him or her to stay aware but ultimately seems to
leave the reader in a state of oblivion.
The only thing that helps the reader to stay aware, is the threat evoked by the different
plotlines.79 The reader stays aware in the hope of finding a relief from this threat, to
eventually find out how the orchestrated sabotage unfolds. The sudden intrusion of the
storylines are strange and mysterious and the reader wants to discover how they are related
to the main story. For example, the climber becomes more threatening with each
appearance in the text. We even discover that he carries a ‘real or imitation semiautomatic
79
In “The Suffering Channel” we encounter a similar feeling of an overarching threat and terror. The story is set
in July 2001 and we follow certain employees of the magazine Style. Their editorial offices are located in one of
the towers of World Trade Center in New York. Small clues to the terrorist attacks can be throughout in the text:
‘the tragedy by which Style would enter history two months hence’ (Wallace 2005, 245). But similar to “Mister
Squishy”, the drama that looms over the story actually never happens in the story.
72
weapon’ (40). The reader is curious about the purpose of this storyline and wonders
whether or not the climber will ever reach the window of Schmidt’s conference room.80
Similarly, the spy in the Focus Group, our ‘I-character’, is a mysterious threat to the story. It
is unsettling for the reader to receive tons of data about the members of the Focus Group,
while he or she knows that one of them is a mysterious spy. The reader learns that this
character is wearing a watch, glasses and a sweater and that he had already eaten three
cakes.81 The reader has to decide whether or not to remember these details because
throughout the text, we are given similar details about the Focus Group Members. The
reader might therefore stay aware in the hope of discovering who the spy is.82
The storyline about the poison also evokes an unsettling effect. This storyline remains rather
vague and mysterious for most readers. Only if the reader stays aware to discover small
clues, will it become clear that it is Terry Schmidt who wants to poison the snack cake. It
becomes even more dramatic when we imagine the possibility that Terry Schmidt had
already poisoned the cakes in the conference room. While Schmidt is the target of a
sabotage plan, he was also planning his own sabotage. In the end however, nothing really
80
It is mentioned that the climber ‘was splayed beneath the seventeenth/eighteenth floor, appearing to just stay
there attached to the window and waiting’ (42). It is here where he will inflate himself. This is interesting
because the first sentence of the story tells us that the Focus Group was ‘reconvened in another of Reesemeyer
Shannon Belt Advertising’s nineteenth-floor conference rooms’ (3)
81
‘I was one of the men in this room, the only one wearing a wristwatch who never once glanced at it. What
looked just like glasses were not. (…) my sweater’s sleeve (…). The cakes, of which I had already made a show of
eating three, were so sweet they hurt your teeth’ (14)
82
Terry Schmidt helps us to discover who the spy is. Because of his experience, he is able to detect that there
are two UAFs (Unintroduced Assistant Facilitator) in the conference room. It becomes clear that one of them is
the spy. He was ‘a silent earnest-eyed bespectacled man who sat in blazer and turtleneck at the table’s far
corner’ (19). On page 57, the I-character tells us that the tube through which the vomit will go, emerged ‘from
the turtleneck through a small hole just under my chin’ (57). More clues are given about this UAF throughout the
story and it becomes clear that he is the spy. For example, ‘the overstylized UAF’s pager went off by
prearrangement’ (36). Moreover, it seems that he already starts to act as if he is sick: ‘by this time three of the
men actually had their heads down on the table, including the overeccentric UAF, who was also emitting tiny low
moans’ (54). It becomes clear that this UAF had been irritating Schmidt during the whole presentation. Before
the intrusion of the I-character, we learn that Schmidt notices ‘how one of the UAFS, (…) had been allowed by
Team ∆y’s UAF Coordinator to cultivate an eccentric and (to most Focus Group members) irritating set of
personal mannerism whose very conspicuousness served to disguise his professional identity’ (8).
73
happens. The threatening feeling remains and the reader can only imagine what might have
happened.83
With these open-ended plotlines, Wallace evokes ‘the alienating (read: critically rousing)
effects of disrupted or convoluted (or altogether absent) plotlines’ (Benzon 2004). The
reader is alienated, unsettled and confused by the ending of “Mister Squishy”. He or she is
not allowed an end to the story. Most readers already have to struggle while reading this
story but moreover, they are left disillusioned and frustrated after reading it. They struggled
to stay aware but seem to get nothing in return for their struggle. What the reader
experiences in “Mister Squishy” reflects what Wallace diagnosed as the central struggle for
humans in our contemporary society. In his introduction to The Best American Essays 2007,
Wallace described the multiplicity of voices and data in our lives as
a kind of Total Noise that’s also the sound of our U.S. culture right now, a culture and
volume of info and spin and rhetoric and context that I know I’m not alone in finding
too much to even absorb, much less try to make sense of or organize into any kind of
triage or saliency or value. Such basic absorption, organization, and triage used to be
what was required of an educated adult, a.k.a. an informed citizen – at least that’s
what I got taught. Suffice it here to say that the requirements now seem different
(2007, 1-2)
Similarly, “Mister Squishy” seems too much to absorb, too much to make sense of and too
much to organize for the reader. The different functions of the machine have a lulling and
paralyzing effect on the reader. The reader tries to stay aware but the story is too much to
organize or make sense of. Wallace wanted to evoke what it is like to be a human being right
now and he therefore ‘felt he couldn’t ignore the ambient noise of the contemporary, for
the simple reason that it is everywhere. It is the water we swim in’ (Smith 2011, 288). In all
83
There is an interesting, small storyline that refers to this idea. When the climber reached the eight floor, which
appeared to house ‘the circulation and subscription departments of Playboy magazine’ (34), we are told that
‘the employees’ reaction to the sight of the back of a lithe blue-and-white figure attached to the window by a
large suction cup on its head can only be imagined’ (34). While the narrator seems to be highly omniscious of
everything in this story, he is not able to imagine what goes on behind these windows. Both for the crowd and
the reader, the climber is ‘provoking God only knows what reaction from the Playboy magazine corporate staff
on the glass’s inside’ (38).
74
of his stories, Wallace’s diagnosis clearly resonates, but “Mister Squishy” puts the reader in
the experience of his diagnosis. The reader really has to struggle in order to stay aware
amidst the noise of “Mister Squishy”. Boswell, with regard to Oblivion in general, argued that
Wallace is guilty of the ‘imitative fallacy’:
In trying to depict contemporary existence as a whirlwind of useless, alienating and
unremittingly boring data, he also produces a book that is, for vast stretches, dull and
alienating (2013)
However, I argue that this is not a ‘fallacy’. In “Mister Squishy”, it is exactly Wallace’s aim to
put the reader in an authentic experience even if it turns out to be a complex, alienating and
painful one. The reader is not allowed to sit in his seat of a passive, ironic spectator but is
challenged to become an active and experimental reader. Wallace wants us to become
aware of what he regards as one of the causes of our contemporary suffering. In “Mister
Squishy”, he is able to make the reader aware by making the reader experience his
diagnosis. In “Good Old Neon”, Wallace shows the reader how Neal swims amidst the noise
and eventually drowns. In “Mister Squishy”, I argue that Wallace pushes his readers into the
pool and forces them to start swimming.84
As a vitalistic author, Wallace also wants to provide new possibilities for life in “Mister
Squishy”. Wallace realized that ‘the requirements now seem different’ (2007, 1-2). The
previous generation tried to organize and make sense of the noise around us. However, in
“Mister Squishy” this is almost possible. If the reader tries to organize “Mister Squishy”, he
or she will be left disillusioned. For the reader, “Mister Squishy” will appear to have the
same purpose as Team ∆y eventually did for the disillusioned Terry Schmidt when he argued
that the true function of Team ∆y was ‘not to provide information or even a statistical
approximation of information but rather its entropic converse, a cascade of random noise’
(Wallace 2005, 44). The unsettling effect of the storylines helps to reader to stay aware, but
it feels as if everything falls into oblivion at the end of the story. We are faced with a similar
84
It can be said that Wallace actually pushes his readers into the pool in all of his stories. But “Mister Squishy”
feels more like a wild water ride.
75
noise in “Mister Squishy” as the ‘Total Noise’ outside. However, the story also confronts us
with the way we approach this noise. Wallace’s style shows itself to be a multiplicity that is
capable of triggering oblivion and at the same time evoke a sense for something that is not
yet, something more than awareness, a becoming.
5.4.4. The Becoming of “Mister Squishy”
In previous sections I discussed how Wallace’s style and technique is a style that makes the
reader experience an authentic struggle of life. The style of a great author ‘is always a style
of life too, not anything at all personal, but inventing a possibility of life, a way of existing’
(Deleuze 1995, 100). In “Mister Squishy”, Wallace evokes a new possibility of life for the
reader so that he or she might be able to confront “Mister Squishy” in all its multiplicity. This
would be a way of existing in which we would not have to regard this story as a struggle. The
story is a multiplicity because it both triggers oblivion and attempts to make the reader
aware of new possibilities for life. Wallace’s demand for awareness seems to be a demand
that goes beyond the imperative to stay aware in the struggle against oblivion. Wallace
wants to make us aware of the way we approach our struggle against oblivion. In this story,
Wallace becomes a minor author who wants to invent ‘a people, that is, a possibility of life.
To write for this people who are missing’ (Deleuze 1997, 4).
The story is a form of minor literature because it evokes a line of flight of deterritorialization.
As discussed, the story constantly unsettles the reader so that he or she is not allowed a
footing. Minor literature wants us to realize that to feel settled is not true to life, which is
why it constantly deterritorializes us. Wallace argued that
any “realistic” fiction’s job is opposite [to] what it used to be – no longer making the
strange familiar but making the familiar strange again. It seems important to find
ways of reminding ourselves that most “familiarity” is mediated and delusive
(McCaffery 2012, 38)
76
It is hard for the reader to identify with the story because he is constantly unsettled. The
story never settles because of the several storylines that suddenly invade the text. By doing
so, Wallace portrays a bothness in which he writes a highly metafictional story that is also
able to evoke an authentic experience. The different functions of the literary machine make
it impossible to become familiar with the noise of “Mister Squishy”, just as we will never be
able to become familiar with the ‘Total Noise’ outside the story.
Wallace makes it unable to get to the heart of “Mister Squishy” because great literature,
from a Deleuzian vantage, is ‘nothing more than the connections and productions it makes;
it is what it does’ (Colebrook 2003, 55-55). Wallace makes it unable for us to create an ironic
judgmental point of view while reading this story and therefore urges us to approach this
story as a multiplicity that we cannot fix or structure. “Mister Squishy” is a constant
becoming that never cements into a definite shape, the rising threat never evolves into a
dramatic climax. We cannot ask the story what it means because we should focus on the
vitalistic effects of becoming, difference and multiplicity it evokes within the reader. The
reader is confronted with a multiplicity and given the opportunity to experience new ways of
existing.
In the metafictional layer of this story, the reader is confronted with new ways of living. It
shows us how we should not make the same mistake as Terry Schmidt and Neal who tried to
fix the multiplicity of forces in life. “Mister Squishy” confronts us with the fact that we still
approach life and literature with an ironic ascent. Wallace wants us to become aware that
we still suffer because whenever we are confronted with the multiplicity of life, we try to fix
and structure it towards a certain end or goal. Wallace’s diagnosis is felt by the reader in this
story. In “Mister Squishy”, the reader expects to be relieved from the threat of the story but
ends up feeling disillusioned. The reader is confronted with a style that demands awareness
but ultimately leaves him or her in total oblivion. But the metafictional layer shows us that
we should not expect to ever be relieved from the multiplicities that life and literature can
evoke. In fact, the struggle is what makes us real and human. In the metafictional layer, we
are shown new ways for approaching “Mister Squishy”. We are shown to accept that this
story is a multiplicity and that we should not try to fix and structure it into anything other
than it is. We should become aware of the multiplicity of Wallace’s style that demands
awareness of the reader while also lulling him or her into oblivion. Even readers who enjoy
77
staying aware throughout a formally difficult story, will have to accept that their reading will
inevitably go hand in hand with oblivion. The reader should become aware of the fact that
his or her struggle to stay aware will always evoke a sense of oblivion. “Mister Squishy”
therefore offers us the opportunity to approach the authentic struggle it evokes in new
ways.
Reading “Mister Squishy” is accompanied by an unsettling sense of dramatic irony
where the reader gradually becomes aware of the characters being caught up in
labyrinthine systems of which they necessarily remain largely unaware. (…) it is
exactly this blend of knowingness and insecurity that galvanizes Wallace’s fiction
(Giles 2007, 339)
There is a constant threat that unsettles the story but the reader discovers that everything is
actually a highly orchestrated sabotage. Alan Britton, the master-orchestrator of the
sabotage, wants to unsettle the Focus Group Facilitators: ‘All they needed were the
stressors. Nested, high-impact stimuli. Shake them up. Rattle the cage, he said, watch what
fell out’ (Wallace 2005, 65). The climber and the spy in the Focus Group are those stimuli
that will shake and rattle Terry Schmidt. A dramatic irony looms over the story because a
sabotage is being orchestrated around Schmidt, without him being aware of it.
However, the dramatic irony also looms over the reader unless he or she becomes aware
that this story is highly orchestrated. The story is embedded in a metafictional layer that
reminds the reader that all of this is being orchestrated by the author. The author makes the
reader struggle through the complex style and unsettles him or her with sudden intrusions
of mysterious storylines. Eventually, the reader discovers that these storylines were stimuli
to shake and rattle Terry Schmidt. But Terry Schmidt is never confronted with these stimuli.
In fact, it is only the reader who is actually confronted with the unsettling effect of these
stimuli. The stimuli are aimed at us and they definitely shake and rattle us in our cage. In the
metafictional layer of the story, Wallace confronts us with the way we experienced these
stimuli.
78
Wallace reflects the experience of the reader in the crowd that watches the climber from
the street below. The crowd is confronted with a mysterious and threatening stimulus and
they want to figure out what it all means. The climber is something unsettling that the crowd
cannot grasp, ‘visually, he was both conspicuous and complex’ (19). Everybody desires to
figure out who or what the climber is: ‘new members of the crowd always asked the people
around them what was going on, whether they knew anything’ (27). But the experience of
watching this climber is too strange for the crowd, they simply cannot grasp it. The climber
presented an overall sight so complex and unlike anything from any member of the (…)
crowd’s visual experience that there were several moments of dead silence as
everyone’s individual neocortices worked to process the visual information and to scan
their memories for any thing or combination of live or animated things the figure might
resemble or suggest (38)
The crowd is both frustrated and scared. The climber evokes feelings of terror but also
curiosity. The speculation rises amongst the crowd now that ‘he appeared less conventionally
human’ (39). They want an answer or an end to this strange threat. The climber keeps on
climbing and rising and the more he climbs, the more threatening he becomes. He takes out
a microphone, a gun and ‘for what might even conceivably be a miniaturized combat-grade
gas mask’ (40).85 The panic rises among the members of the crowd and they cannot agree on
the purpose of his climb. They start to speculate that maybe it is a PR stunt or maybe the
climber is a daredevil or even a terrorist. Firefighters, cops and even helicopters arrive at the
scene. Suddenly, the climber stays attached to the window of the seventeenth or eighteenth
floor (42). The climber starts to attach something to his rear end which disgusts the crowd86,
until they suddenly become aware of who or what he is.
85
‘or even maybe Jaysus help us all if it was a flamethrower or Clancy-grade biochemical aerosol nebulizer gizmo
thing, the officer with the Dept.issue high-x binoculars reported’ (40)
86
‘More than a few among the crowd and police initially used the words sick, sickening, and/or nasty when the
tank’s deltate nozzle was affixed to the protuberance at the center of the figures rear ends white-and-navy
bullseye design’ (53).
79
The climber or the figure suddenly starts to inflate ‘until the figure’s entire costume had
become large, bulbous, and doughily cartoonish’ (53). The climber inflates into a large figure
with legs and arms until ‘the face’s array of patternless lines rounding to resolve into
something that produced from 400+ ground-level US adults loud cries of recognition and an
almost childlike delight’ (53). He looked ‘cartoonishly inhuman’ (38) and now he inflates
himself to something ‘doughily cartoonish’ (53) with a ‘white-and-navy bullseye design’ (53).87
The climber inflates himself into “Mister Squishy” and the crowd goes wild in their recognition.
The climber keeps on climbing and rising until he almost reaches the 19th floor where Terry
Schmidt is giving the presentation. But the climber never reaches Terry Schmidt and never
gives us an end to the story. Instead, the climber becomes “Mister Squishy”. The story rises
and rises in suspension until it almost reaches a dramatic climax which ultimately never
comes. The threat is not relieved, the storylines do not come together. The story rises and
rises only to inflate itself and to show us that it is nothing but what it is, “Mister Squishy”. The
story rises like the climber and the reader is urged to acknowledge that ‘there were high
degrees of both precision and economy in the way the figure orchestrated his different
extremities’ tasks’ (20). The story shows itself to be an orchestrated plan to unsettle and
sabotage the reader. The dramatic irony was on the reader who is rattled in his cage.
Wallace confronts us with the way we approach an unsettling multiplicity like this story. He
demands we become aware of the way we read and live. In the story, the members of the
crowd are forced to watch themselves watching the climber: ‘It was also impossible for some
people in the front portion of the street and sidewalk’s crowd to resist looking at their own
and the whole collective’s reflection in the Gap’s display window’ (39). Similarly, Wallace us
wants to become aware of his diagnosis and reflect why “Mister Squishy” was such a
frustrating and painful struggle to stay aware amidst the chaos. The metafiction confronts the
readers with their own way of reading “Mister Squishy”.
87
‘the familiar distinctive Mister Squishy navy-and-white design scheme’ (5)
80
The readers of this story only stayed aware because they wanted the climber to become
meaningful, they wanted the story to have a purpose and they wanted to be relieved from
their struggle. However, the reader is left disillusioned if he or she wanted the climber to reach
the conference room or the spy to suddenly start vomiting. The reader is confronted with the
fact that he or she fixed an untouchable navigational star at the end of this story. But this is
impossible, the story cannot be fixed or structured because it is a constant becoming. Minor
literature never allows the reader to settle because it shakes and rattles the ground of
literature and language. Even if the entire sabotage is something we can figure out, the story
is a multiplicity because it evokes a whole range of other forces. For example, there are other
forces of becoming-Mister-Squishy in this story. Terry Schmidt himself appears to become
“Mister Squishy”, he ‘would call himself, directly, to his mirrored face, Mister Squishy’ (33).88
Schmidt is becoming predictable and orchestrated because of his profession in the market
research business, but he also becomes an unpredictable threat to the story. We cannot fix
Terry Schmidt into a being. He is a multiplicity, sincere and fraudulent, predictable and
unpredictable. The core of the story is a multiplicity without a center, it is constantly
becoming. Similar to the fact that the actual center of the story, the Reesemeyer Mayer
Shannon Belt building, never settles: ‘You had to work on the upper floors for some time
before you noticed the very slight sway with which the building’s structural design
accommodated winds off the lake’ (15). The story has a sway or a sense of becoming that we
cannot settle into a being.
The reader is confronted with the way most of us deal with these multiplicities that we
encounter in literature and life. We were already shown how disillusioned Schmidt and Neal
eventually become because they tried to set an unreachable standard that could structure the
88
‘[Schmidt] would look at his face and at the faint lines and pouches that seemed to grow a little
more pronounced each quarter and would call himself, directly, to his mirrored face, Mister Squishy,
the name would come unbidden into his mind, and despite his attempts to ignore or resist it the
large subsidiary’s name and logo had become the dark part of him’s latest taunt, so that when he
thought of himself now it was as something he called Mister Squishy, and his own face and the plump
and wholly innocuous icon’s face tended to bleed in his mind into one face, crude and line-drawn and
clever in a small way, a design that someone might find some small selfish use for but could never
love or hate or ever care to truly know. (33-34)
81
chaos of their lives. In “Mister Squishy”, the reader is confronted with the fact that he or she
made the same mistake. Wallace points out new possibilities for life by making us aware of
what makes us suffer in our attempts to stay aware. Instead of being disillusioned, Wallace
wants us to react like the crowd and start yelling with childlike delight and produce loud cries
of recognition because we realize that the story is “Mister Squishy”. He wants us to become
aware that life is not the goal or end we fix at the end of it, but that our journey towards home
is our home. That the struggle we experience while reading this story is all we will ever ‘have’.
But Wallace writes for a people to come. He evokes possibilities for life that are not yet
present. He wants to evoke a people that would not have to struggle while reading “Mister
Squishy”. A people that is able to live in the multiplicity of life. Wallace’s style is a multiplicity
of life. His writing style demands an awareness because it triggers oblivion but his style of life
evokes something more than awareness, it evokes new ways of approaching our struggle to
stay aware. Wallace evokes these vitalistic lines of flight and he can only hope that he is able
to evoke a becoming within the reader. He can only hope that he is able to carry his readers
along these lines of flight. The story evokes a becoming that I cannot pin down into a being in
this dissertation. We can only imagine what the story becomes and I can only imagine what
“Mister Squishy” might become within each reader. Maybe Wallace can strengthen a sense
for multiplicity and difference within his readers.
His reader might become that person in the crowd who is able to point out what the climber
will become: ‘The costume was airtight, the guy was inflatable or designed to look that way,
the long-haired man said. He appeared to be talking to his bicycle; no one acknowledged him’
(27). But these are possibilities for life that are still a becoming. Similar to the crowd, the
reader was not able to acknowledge him either. At this point of the story, the reader did not
want the climber to inflate himself into “Mister Squishy”. Every reader wants the climber to
eventually reach the conference room. Wallace shows us that this is what makes us human.
While reading, the reader was not yet ready to become aware that “Mister Squishy” will inflate
itself, that the struggle is his or her home. Wallace confronts us with the way we are because
we can only experience these effects if we wanted the climber to reach the conference room.
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Wallace confronts us with the way we are but he also points out what we might become. A
Deleuzian framework argues ‘that the purpose or force of art (…) goes beyond what life is to
what it might become’ (Colebrook 2003, 14). “Mister Squishy” therefore evokes a possibility
of life, way of life where reading “Mister Squishy” would not even be a possible source of
suffering. The story rattles us in our cage so that we might become aware of why we suffer in
our own lives and when we read literature. The story makes us aware of Wallace’s diagnosis
but it also evokes a becoming in the reader, a becoming of new possibilities for life.
This is why Deleuze can be useful for approaching Wallace’s writing or fiction in general. A
Deleuzian framework urges us to form ‘questions through literature, questions that should
challenge life’ (Colebrook 2003, 7). A great work of art is able to evokes these questions as
well. If we approach “Mister Squishy” not as a struggle between awareness and oblivion that
eventually leaves us feeling disillusioned, but as a source of becoming, the reader is able to
experience new possibilities for life. In “Mister Squishy” the reader is challenged to transform
the way he or she approached this story and therefore challenged to transform the way he or
she approaches similar struggles in his or her own life. This Deleuzian reading focused on the
vitalistic effects “Mister Squishy” is able to produce. The reader is challenged to become, to
become something other than he or she already was.
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6. Conclusion
For David Foster Wallace, watching Roger Federer play was a religious experience because
he showed new and unforeseen possibilities in the game of tennis. He was ‘a creature whose
body is both flesh and, somehow, light’ (Wallace 2006). In “Mister Squishy”, the climber
inflates himself into “Mister Squishy” and ‘reflected light aswim all around him’ (Wallace
2005, 41). The inflation of “Mister Squishy” evokes new possibilities for life within the
reader. In this dissertation, a Deleuzian framework showed how Wallace frees life from
where it’s trapped. Wallace’s writing is a vitalistic multiplicity that breaks new ground
beyond postmodern irony. Wallace gives the reader something authentic while portraying a
multiplicity of metafiction and sincerity. In the story “Mister Squishy”, this multiplicity is
embodied as a Deleuzian clinical and critical project. Wallace diagnosed that we try to
escape our struggle with the multiplicities of life by affixing a navigational star to it. In
“Mister Squishy”, Wallace makes the reader experience his diagnosis in his style and
technique. “Mister Squishy” makes our heads throb heartlike. The reader tries to stay aware
while constantly being unsettled by an overload of data, a complex style and endless
digressions. The reader stays aware because of the threatening suspension created by the
mysterious storylines. But the reader is never granted a relief from this threat and is left
both disillusioned and unsettled. “Mister Squishy” is a multiplicity that lulls the reader into
oblivion but at the same time, it makes him or her experience new possibilities for life. The
story confronts the reader with his approach towards multiplicities and evokes new
possibilities for approaching the struggle to stay aware in a multiplicity. The story evokes a
becoming within the reader, a becoming of new possibilities for life. But the becoming that
“Mister Squishy” evokes within the reader, is a becoming and not a being. Writing about this
becoming is like writing about jazz and writing about jazz is like dancing about architecture.89
Gilles Deleuze was a vantage to show how “Mister Squishy” evokes a becoming. I am only
sporadically a dancer but “Mister Squishy” evoked a becoming within me, a becoming of
something other than I already was. I can only hope “Mister Squishy” evoked something
within me, a “becoming-dancer”.
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Thelonious Monk
84
7. Appendix
‘It had occurred to Terry Schmidt that even though so many home products, from Centrum
Multivitamins to Visine AC Soothing Antiallergenic Eye Drops to Nasacort AQ Prescription
Nasal Spray, now came in conspicuous tamperproof packaging in the wake of the Tylenol
poisonings of a decade past and Johnson & Johnson’s legendarily swift and conscientious
response to the crisis – pulling every bottle of every variety of Tylenol off every retail shelf in
America and spending millions on setting up overnight a smooth and hassle-free system for
every Tylenol consumer to return his or her bottle for an immediate NQA refund plus an
added sum for the gas and mileage or US postage involved in the return, writing off tens of
millions in returns and operational costs and recouping untold exponents more in positive
PR and consumer goodwill and thereby actually enhancing the brand Tylenol’s association
with compassion and concern for consumer wellbeing, a strategy that had made J. & J.’s CEO
and their PR vendors legends in a marketing field that Terry Schmidt had only just that year
begun considering getting into as a practical and potentially creative and rewarding way to
use his double major in Descriptive Statistics + Bv. Psych, the young Schmidt imagining
himself in plush conference rooms not unlike this one, using the sheer force of his
personality and command of the facts to persuade tablesful of hard-eyed corporate officers
that legitimate concern for consumer wellbeing was both emotionally and economically
Good Business, that if, e.g., R.J. Reynolds elected to be forthcoming about its products’
addictive qualities, and GM to be upfront in its national ads about the fact that vastly greater
fuel efficiency was totally feasible if consumers would be willing to spend a couple hundred
dollars more and settle for slightly fewer aesthetic amenities, and shampoo manufacturers
to concede that the ‘Repeat’ in their product instructions was hygienically unnecessary, and
Tums’ parent General Brands to spend a couple million to announce candidly that Tumsbrand antacid tablets should not be used regularly for more than a couple weeks at a time
because after that the stomach lining automatically started secreting more HCI to
compensate for all the neutralization and made the original stomach trouble worse, that the
consequent gains in corporate PR and associations of the brand with integrity and trust
85
would more than outweigh the short-term costs and stock-price repercussions, that yes it
was a risk but not a wild or dicelike risk, that it had on its side both precedent cases and
demographic data as well as the solid reputation for both caginess and integrity of T.E.
Schmidt & Associates, to concede that yes gentlemen he supposed he was in a way asking
them to gamble some of their narrow short-term margins and equity on the humble sayso of
Terence Eric Schmidt Jr., whose own character’s clear marriage of virtue, pragmatism, and
oracular marketing savvy were his best and final argument; he was saying to these uppermanagement men in their vests and Cole Haans just what he proposed to have them say to a
sorry and cynical US market: Trust Me You Will Not Be Sorry – which when he thinks of the
starry-eyed puerility and narcissism of these fantasies now, a rough decade later, Schmidt
experiences a kind of full-frame internal wince, that type of embarrassment-before-self that
makes our most mortifying memories objects of fascination and repulsion at once, though in
Terry Schmidt’s case a certain amount of introspection and psychotherapy (the latter the
origin of the self-caricature doodling during downtime in his beige cubicle) had enabled him
to understand that his professional fantasies were not in the main all that unique, that a
large percentage of bright young men and women locate the impetus behind their career
choice in the belief that they are fundamentally different from the common run of man,
unique and in certain crucial ways superior, more as it were central, meaningful – what else
could explain the fact that they themselves have been at the exact center of all they’ve
experienced for the whole 20 years of their conscious lives? – and that they can and will
make a difference in their chosen field simply by the fact of their unique and central
presence in it …; and but so (Schmidt also still declaiming professionally to the TFG all this
while) that even though so many upmarket consumer products now were tamperproof,
Mister Squishy-brand snack cakes – as well as Hostess, Litlle Debbie, Dolly Madison, the
whole softconfection industry with its flimsy neopolymerized wrappers and cheap thin
cardboard Economy Size containers – were decidedly not tamperproof at all, that it would
take nothing more than one thin-gauge hypodermic and 24 infinitesimal doses of KCN, As₂O,
ricin, C₂₁H₂₂O₂N₂, acincetilcholine, botulinus, or even merely Tl or some other aqueous basemetal compound to bring almost an entire industry down on one supplicatory knee; for even
if the soft-confection manufacturers survived the initial horror and managed to recover
some measure of consumer trust, the relevant products’ low price was an essential part of
their established Market Appeal Matrix, and the costs of reinforcing the Economy packaging
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or rendering the individual snack cakes visibly invulnerable to a thin-gauge hypodermic
would push the products out so far right on the demand curve that mass-market snacks
would become economically and emotionally untenable, corporate soft confections going
thus the way of hitchhiking, unsupervised trick-or-treating, door-to-door sales, & c. ( Wallace
2005, 28-32)
87
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